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Keen On… So What’s The Big Deal About Big Data? [TCTV]
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Andrew Keen
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
And so the book has finally been written about Big Data. This new book, – written by Oxford University professor and journalist – is definitive guide to a new age which, both authors promise, is going to revolutionize the way we live, work and think. But “we are still in the first inning” of this age, Cukier says. So what are the business opportunities right now, I ask them, for startup entrepreneurs wanting to unlock new economic value in the big data economy? Healthcare and automotive, Cukier argues. Education, Mayer-Schonberger adds. But both authors also recognize the dangers of a big data age in which we flesh-and-blood humans might be in danger of ourselves being reduced to mere data.
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Big Moment For Vine As First Wolverine Movie Footage Comes Via 6-Second “Tweaser” Instead Of Trailer
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
Vine’s ready for its close-up. The first footage of new Marvel comics superhero film The Wolverine was released today through a Vine “tweaser” by director James Mangold. That’s a big departure from the modern tradition of first releasing a trailer on a film’s website, Apple’s trailer page and YouTube. Seems Hollywood has realized nothing leaves people wanting more like a great Vine. Swordplay, samurais, gun fighting, love, adamantium claws, and Wolverine hurtling through the air are all squished into . There are zero lines spoken, few plot clues, and no titles shown except for the film’s logo. Which is perfect. Wolverine, the X-Men, and Marvel already have such a rabid fan base, so this will be plenty to get them salivating. Pushing the clip to the owned by Twitter seems brilliant to me.
The first 20-second long trailer preview won’t come out until tomorrow, with a full trailer set to premiere on Wednesday, according to . The film is set to be released July 24th. It follows Wolverine’s adventures in Japan and relationship with Yakuza-affiliated love interest Mariko Yashida. Mangold tweeted the Wolverine Vine, simply titling it “tweaser” (Twitter teaser, get it? Yeah? OK, sorry). It may very well be the coming of age of a new marketing medium for video-based content. The short pre-defined length, retweetability, and fact that Vines play right within tweets mean tweasers can quickly reach a large audience. Since it’s such a low investment to open a Vine because you know it will only be six seconds, many who aren’t typical fans of the content may succumb to watching the clip. While a normal trailer could convince someone a film isn’t for them or steal the best jokes, a Vine just leaves people curious. While some brands have already , don’t be surprised if you start seeing tweasers for more movies, TV shows, sporting events and . It’s a brave new attention-deficit world we’re living in.
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Why Startups Are Beating Carriers (Or The Curious Case Of The Premium SMS Horoscope Service & The Lack Of Customer Consent)
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
Any startups out there seeking to build a business by setting out to confuse as many users as possible with overly complex pricing structures, while tricking those who can’t afford the full-fat service into signing up for ridiculously over-priced rubbish and then making it really hard for them to opt out? If so you’ll want to look to carriers for inspiration. Startups aren’t immune to dubious and irresponsible behaviour, of course — without asking properly first, for instance, or — but those that act like douches have to worry that their douchey behviour will cause them to (rightly) lose users. Carriers operate differently: their infrastructure has created captive markets, making it tough for customers to switch to a better alternative. Hence the shoddy behaviour. But the carrier oligopoly is being challenged by over the top data services. And while the network operators are not about to lose their fiefdoms entirely, they are being pushed onto the back foot. The shift from circuit switched voice-plus-text services to all-IP mobile data has allowed Internet companies to come in and start disrupting their lucrative walled gardens. The traditional carrier revenue streams of voice and SMS are being eroded by more flexible and cheaper VoIP and over-the-top messaging alternatives, whether it’s Skype or Viber or Whatsapp or Line. According to a recent report by more than $3 billion in operator messaging revenue will be eradicated between 2012 and 2017 — thanks to the rise of OTT services. Carriers becoming ‘dumb pipes’ — or to put it slightly less pejoratively, a utility service, a la water, electricity and gas — seems all but inevitable (not that anyone is going to weep on their behalf). But this outcome is not exclusively the result of faster and more innovative startups. To say so is to gloss over how badly carriers have adapted and evolved their business models — preferring, instead, to try to block upstart rivals in order to milk as much as they can from ailing cash cows, rather than accepting that the technology landscape is shifting — and moving on to pastures new. Having built businesses on restricting and locking in customers — to contracts, to irritating portals, to complex tariff structures, you name it — telcos clearly have trouble thinking outside their locked box approach. And while it’s fair to say that many established companies have trouble rekindling an entrepreneurial spirit — and let’s face it telcos have network infrastructure not software in their DNA — carriers could still have done more to dig themselves out of this innovation hole. Ultimately they still have themselves to blame. Some carriers are attempting to get in on the over the top services action individually, or by banding together via collective initiatives such as . But setting aside their conservative, reactionary mindset and suspicion of new ideas — which already puts them at a disadvantage vs startups and app makers — a massive problem they face in a pick ‘n’ mix world of opt in and out data services is a chronic lack of customer trust. Why should anyone opt in to a new service from a company that’s been doing its best to screw its users for years? Telcos have blotted their own copybook by treating customers like cattle to be penned in and milked dry. Carriers are not service businesses or entertainment businesses, they are tax collectors — putting up as many toll gates and penalty policed speed limits on your use of their roads as they can. Little wonder they are held in near universal contempt by users. And that’s a pretty terrible position to be in when the walls of your citadel are under attack like never before. (Joyn us? No thanks!) Here’s one example of current carrier car-crash behaviour, involving T-Mobile U.K. — which in my view is symptomatic of carriers’ wider failings, and illustrates how far they have to go to reform their operations if they are ever going to be able to successfully compete in the popularity contest of apps and services. Before I go any further, it’s worth noting this is not, by any means, an isolated example — see the following for example (such as the one screengrabbed below) complaining of near identical issues with T-Mobile, dating back years. A 70-year-old member of my family ordered a pay-as-you-go SIM from T-Mobile UK, with £10 preloaded. This tariff means you don’t pay a monthly fee to use the network, you just pay for your actual usage (phone calls, texts and mobile data) The SIM was left in its packet for three days until the smartphone (an iPhone) was given to her. On activating the SIM we noticed unsolicited horoscope text messages from a shortcode ‘3030’. None of the messages indicated the texts cost money to receive On checking the PAYG balance the morning after putting the SIM in the phone, the £10 was found to have dropped to £8.22 — despite no calls having been made or chargeable texts sent. (Being as it’s an iPhone there is no carrier portal where horoscope ‘services’ could have been signed up for in error either) A T-Mobile customer service representative told us the horoscope service was a premium SMS service (each SMS cost 40p to receive). It said it was operated by a third party company. We were told we had opted in to receive the texts on March 6 — which was two days before the SIM was taken out of its packet and put in the phone. On pointing this out, the rep said T-Mobile would investigate the issue and call back the next morning. He also said he would put a block on third party SMSes T-Mobile did not call back. And another horoscope text arrived. On calling T-Mobile again, a different spokesperson said we should text STOP to the number to stop the texts. This spokesperson claimed the texts were sent by a company called MX Telecom who we would need to contact to secure a refund To my eye, it was pretty obvious that something dubious was going on — so at the same time as we tried to sort the issue out via T-Mobile’s customers services phone line I contacted the T-Mobile press office to ask how they could explain a customer being signed up to a premium service without their consent or knowledge? Had there been a data breach, or were they in fact opting PAYG customers into paid services without their consent? After several days investigating the issue, T-Mobile’s press office told me the 3030 service is actually a T-Mobile service, not a third party service at all. (Worth reiterating that T-Mobile’s customer services never gave us this information, despite multiple calls about 3030. We were incorrectly informed it was a third party, multiple times.) The company then claimed that the reason the PAYG SIM had been automatically signed up to receive SMS horoscopes at 40p a pop was because the associated phone number was an old number and the prior owner of it had signed up to the service. It said the failure to remove the old subscription was down to “human error”. Here’s the statement the company provided in full: As part of an Ofcom directive to ensure that the UK doesn’t run out of numbers, PAYG numbers are recycled. In this instance, it appears that the premium text service attached to the number remained when the number was transferred to [the customer]. When PAYG numbers are recycled, they are attached to new SIMs so no personal data is transferred. We have placed a block on [the customer’s] account to stop any further texts and we have credited her account to cover the charges incurred. This was an isolated human error and no personal data was shared. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Now, it is possible this problem was caused by human error. But it’s not an isolated error — judging by others complaining of this same problem with T-Mobile on various forums (and let’s not pretend, T-Mobile is the only offender here — I’ve found on associated with other UK carriers). The problem has apparently recurred for years, judging by some of these posts. Moreover, it seems rather — shall we say — suspicious that the horoscope service that was never signed up for by my family member (indeed, could not have been signed up for since the SIM was still in its packet when the service was activated) was for the correct star sign. There are 12 signs of the Zodiac. Eleven of them would have been incorrect. But T-Mobile’s horoscope service delivered premium SMS for the star sign that is associated with my family member’s birth date. Coincidence? That’s what T-Mobile claimed when I asked about this (and about why we were never told T-Mobile operates the 3030 service): We apologise for the misinformation you have received. We have training processes in place for all our customer service staff, to ensure they are aware of all details relating to the products and services we offer. We continually look to review this process to make improvements, as well as address any specific issues as and when informed. The star sign being the same was a coincidence, and with the forum posts we can’t comment on specifics without investigating each case further. If customers believe they have mistakenly signed up for the service, we’re happy to talk to them on a case-by-case basis. It is certainly possible that the prior owner of the phone number was also a pisces so it could be a coincidence. But when you consider that part of the ordering process for the SIM involved my family member providing T-Mobile with her birth date it does seem rather less convincingly coincidental. T-Mobile had the data to calculate her star sign, as well as having her phone number and deductible PAYG balance — all the data it needed, in other words, to sign her up to a premium service and deduct money. All it lacked was her consent. But let’s be charitable and assume it was just coincidence in this case, and human errors in all the various forum complaints (some carrier led, some customer caused), part of the problem why carrier premium SMS services are so apparently sloppy is the lack of regulatory oversight to rein in these “errors”. In the UK, an organisation called Phonepayplus regulates premium SMS services — but only third party premium SMS services. It referred me to telecoms watchdog Ofcom when I asked if it had received complaints about T-Mobile’s 3030 service. But Ofcom doesn’t regulate this service either — having decided to remove ‘own-portal’ services (which a spokeswoman told me the premium SMSes would fall under) from the scope of its regulation in July 2012. Meaning carrier premium SMS services are currently unregulated (at least in the U.K.). Among the reasons Ofcom gave for removing own-portal services from its regulatory remit last year (see: pages 21 & 22 ) was: It is sufficiently clear to the consumer who provides the service and to whom they should complain if there is any problem — which is spectacularly ironic, given that the T-Mobile premium SMSes contained no information identifying T-Mobile as the sender; contained no information that the SMSes cost money to receive; and T-Mobile’s own customer services staff repeatedly misidentified the sender as a third party, and never as T-Mobile. T-Mobile did not provide me with information on how many premium SMS services it operates, despite my asking multiple times. However it is possible to dig this information out of its website, by using — ironically — a it hosts on the website (buried under multiple sub-menus). The listing of T-Mobile’s 3030 services ran to three pages — which I have composited into the below graphic. Perhaps carriers think they can get away with a few “human errors” in the premium SMS department because these services aren’t regulated. Perhaps it’s also symptomatic of the command and control mindset of these oligarchs. What’s certain is that if carriers dedicated a little of the energy they plough into maintaining these anachronistic, valueless (to their customers, that is) premium SMS ‘services’ into creating genuinely useful services that customers want to use then they would have a better shot at competing with the startups leapfrogging their gates. Or they would, if they hadn’t spent years destroying the trust of their users by treating them like numbers on a spreadsheet. There’s a lesson here, for any business — large or small. [ by via ]
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Google Adds Trail Maps For 100 Additional Ski Resorts To Google Maps
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
Winter is almost over, but that isn’t stopping Google from expanding its list of ski runs on Google Maps. Just over a month after its last update, Google today that it has added trail maps for in the U.S. and Canada to Google Maps. Today’s update includes a number of major resorts, including Oregon’s and resorts, as well as smaller ski areas like . Ski runs on Google Maps are marked by the usual blue, green and black lines to mark the difficulty of the terrain. Ski lifts are shown as red dotted lines. Before last month’s update, Google launched its effort to add ski runs to Google Maps by adding about 90 maps in November 2012. Overall, Google Maps users can now find about 225 different ski resorts on Google Maps. Except for a few European mountains that were part of the first batch, Google hasn’t released any new maps for European ski resorts since. Here is a list of all the newly added resorts: [googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=203646134165803478738.0004d889131c0aec6b1dd&msa=0&ie=UTF8&t=m&ll=46.316584,-96.152344&spn=21.255227,56.25&z=4&output=embed&w=640&h=350]
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Twitter Holding A Mobile-Focused Platform Event April 2 To Discuss “Exciting New Features,” No Press Allowed
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
Twitter has released an it’s holding April 2 on its dedicated developer website today. The event is mobile-focused, Twitter says, and will take place at Twitter HQ between 6:30 PM and 9:30 PM Pacific. Twitter says it will use the occasion to share “some exciting new features for the Twitter Platform” it has been working on. In a , Twitter says that the event will address how developers can “best integrated Twitter into [their] mobile experience,” and notes that space is limited. The entry form asks potential attendees to submit their name, the name of their company, their email and Twitter user name, and the invite is open to developers, product managers, designers and more, but not to press. Twitter has been making changes to its API and how it works with third-party developers, including the retirement of API v1, which it . Other recent changes include the , which allows brands to run ad campaigns through its partners instead of setting them up directly through the company itself. The version 1.1 API Twitter officially launched back in September 2012 instituted token limits on third-party apps, and seemed in general designed to discourage apps from trying to replicated the “core” Twitter experience, or what it provides through its own web and native clients. A number of Twitter developers have expressed trepidation at what might be on tap from the company in terms of platform announcements (see developer Paul Haddad’s thoughts below), but Twitter is definitely trying to spin this positive in its own characterization of the event. Twitter events make me nervous, at least it’s not on a Friday, so probably not bad news… — Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) We’ve reached out to Twitter for any additional information they can provide, but as there’s a specific mention of the event being “closed to press,” it’s unclear whether they’ll share anything further. If they do provide comment, we’ll update this post.
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 | null |
Twitter Verification Has More To Do With Being Good At Twitter Than With Identity
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQlY2wbZsjk&w=640&h=360] Twitter has done a great job at keeping the whole verification process a mystery. If curiosity eats away at you like it does me, you’re in luck. A new video from comedians Hari and Ashok Kondabolu, featuring Anil Dash who has around 500k followers, shows . First off, it’s important to know that you can’t ask to be verified. Twitter only offers this blessing upon those with enough followers and popularity to deserve it. However, the company that follower count has no bearing. We don’t accept verification requests from the general public, but we encourage you to continue using Twitter in a meaningful way, and you may be verified in the future. Please note that follower count is not a factor in determining whether an account meets our criteria for verification. If you have been chosen, the Twitter account will hit you up to let you know you’ve been selected, and tell you that you’re only “three steps away” from having that bright blue badge pinned to your account. But Twitter’s process for verifying its users has absolutely nothing to do with verifying identity, so don’t worry about whipping out a drivers’ license or anything. Instead, Twitter uses a painfully easy multiple-choice quiz to test your badge-worthiness. It asks questions like, “Which tweet is more likely to double your followers?” It then gives the option of a live-tweet about the Oscars, complete with hashtag, or option B, “I watched the #Oscars last night.” Anyone with enough followers to be verified knows that Twitter is about real-time communication. All three questions are of the same stock and breed, all stupidly simple. Chances are, Twitter probably does go through some sort of analysis of your Twitter feed and other things to verify that @LadyGaGa and @finkd and @aplusk are legit. But this quiz is pretty silly, considering that all it verifies is that people with a lot of followers are good at Twitter. Which, of course, seems obvious. We’ve reached out to Twitter to see if they can possibly shed a little more light on this. We’ll update if we hear anything.
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Looks Like Those 1M Mystery BlackBerry 10 Devices Went To A Verizon Distributor
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
BlackBerry delivered one of the world’s most mysterious press releases a short time ago when it revealed that it had sold a cool , but now it looks like some sleuthing has turned up the real client. and both report that the likely source of the order was Brightstar, an international distribution company that counts Verizon, along with carriers around the world as its partners. Brightstar is an established BlackBerry customer, and distributes handsets from the Waterloo manufacturer in some of its strongest markets, including in countries like Malaysia where BlackBerry retains very high popularity. Brightstar’s order (if indeed this is the client in question) would indeed be the largest ever single order of BlackBerry devices, but it’s also potentially a way for companies like Verizon to make a sizable bet on the company’s brand new OS and hardware, without taking on all the risk for such an order itself. Detwiler Fenton says that the move indicates “Verizon doesn’t believe this well be a strong seller since it normally tries to allocate hot product on its own,” and that using Brightstar means it will spread out some of the responsibility and potential reward that comes with placing inventory in big-box retail locations like Best Buy, in exchange for the security of not being left solely on the hook should things go south. The U.S. launch of BlackBerry 10 happened last Friday, and while not all the cards are on the table, there’s . BlackBerry has its earnings coming up this week on Thursday, but sales of BB10 devices in the U.S. won’t be included in or influence the results. Still, stock price is down today after last weekend’s launch failed to garner the kind of high-profile success and buzz associated with new hardware from Apple or Samsung. That million is still a big number, and a sizable order. But if Detwiler Fenton is accurate in its report and this involved carriers like Verizon placing an order through their distribution partner, it’s a lot less significant than were it to go to a single buyer. We’ve contacted RIM for comment, but they did not respond by time of publication.
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On-Demand Car Service Uber Finally Embraces Microsoft With A New Windows Phone App
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
I’m a little embarrassed to admit how reliant I’ve become on Uber when I’m traveling — most regular cab drivers seem to find me terribly repellant — but now the service is now is working to expand its reach even further. The folks behind the on-demand car service that Windows Phone users now have a native app of their own, albeit one that doesn’t look quite as pretty as what iOS and Android users are privy to. While Uber has moved to blur any design distinctions between its iOS and Android apps, you won’t mistake the Windows Phone version for either of its mobile cousins. It’s hardly a surprise considering how strongly Microsoft likes to emphasize the visual differences between Windows Phone and its rivals, but this newly-released version of Uber plays home to a blockier, slightly less handsome aesthetic. Still, the bread and butter of the app (hailing cars, populating lists of Foursquare locations for more precise pickups and drop-offs, etc.) seem to work just fine, so I suspect Windows Phone users won’t have much trouble looking past the app’s looks. Uber’s blog post also notes that BlackBerry 7 users can finally get their on-demand black car service on, but the announcement is a little late: the app has been available in BlackBerry World for over a week now. Expanding to other prominent mobile platforms is just par for the course for Uber, but recent questions about the service’s and fairness could put a damper on its growth. In case you haven’t been keeping track, Uber is facing among other things (yeah, another one) in Boston over allegations of skimming drivers’ tips, demanding a more equitable pay scheme and greater input with regard to the service’s operations, and the fallout stemming from an in Washington D.C. Exactly what sort of effect these hefty public relations woes will ultimately have on the San Francisco-based company remains to be seen, but for now it seems Uber is mostly concerned with growing as prominent as it can as quickly as it can.
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NASDAQ’s Glitch Cost Facebook Investors ~$500M. It Will Pay Out Just $62M. IPO Elsewhere.
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
When Twitter or Dropbox go public, they should remember May 18, 2012. The SEC has approved NASDAQ’s of $62 million to investors burned when the stock exchange’s trading systems broke down during Facebook’s IPO. Total losses for investors were pegged at by the Wall Street Journal, though. The debacle should push companies eying big IPOs to look at other exchanges. with other people’s money and Facebook’s reputation when it claimed it was ready to handle one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in history. But the morning of May 18th, the bet went sour. As I wrote back when the (based on play-by-play of the meltdown) there was “a trading delay of 30 minutes and investors were unsure how much of Facebook they’d bought. There were 12 million postponed share orders suddenly filled between 1:49 p.m. and 1:51 p.m. without being properly marked ‘late sale’, which exaggerated the impression that people were trying to dump Facebook shares.” There seemed to be insufficient preparation, no back-up plan, and little communication from NASDAQ. This resulted in confused investors who pulled back from Facebook, thus contributing to its falling price. There were certainly other issues with the IPO, including that Facebook may not have properly announced mobile revenue uncertainty or last-minute revenue forecast cuts. But NASDAQ’s glitches certainly didn’t help, and Facebook is still trying to claw its way back to its $38 IPO price. Now the SEC has given the go-ahead for the NASDAQ to pay out $62 million in cash. As the , eligible investors include some whose orders weren’t carried out, or who weren’t correctly notified when buys or sells did go through. Many banks who lost big money due to the breakdown are understandably unsatisfied with the compensation plan that comes up hundreds of millions of dollars short. Hopefully the whole situation will serve as a lesson to stock exchanges and the companies that IPO on them: Consumer tech is now part of the financial zeitgeist. People want to own a part of the services they use every day. Trading systems must be ready for the onslaught when these companies go on sale. And if something goes wrong, don’t try to play it cool. Have a contingency plan and be prepared to delay an IPO an hour or a day if necessary. It’s better than watching so many dollars disintegrate due to confusion.
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Bait Car: How Hollywood Has Found A New Way To Make Money
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
Paul (not his real name) has never seen the movie . He’s a horror buff and sometimes tries to find odd and decidedly bad flicks to watch with his wife. The Divide would have fit the bill. It made $16,700 at the box office – that amounts to about 2,100 tickets sold – and closed with $130,839 in the bank. It cost $3 million to make. The reviews, not surprisingly, were uniformly bad. “Well, yes. I’m another person who got suckered into watching this piece of garbage. The most important thing you need to know about this movie is that it’s just not worth spending two hours of your life to watch it. It’s just bad,” wrote one IMDb user. “The characters are so cliché and the dialogue is so poorly written that any self-respecting horror lover would quickly roll their eyes, eject the DVD and watch The Mist on cable before falling asleep in his or her clothes,” wrote another. It’s one of those movies for a very specific audience. For guys like Paul. Paul also admits to occasionally torrenting hard-to-find films. But he’s never seen The Divide. He never downloaded it. I believe him. However, a month ago, Paul got a letter from his ISP accusing him of torrenting a copy of the file at midnight one lazy evening. His ISP informed him that his IP address, an identifier that, in truth, constantly changes for most Internet users, was identified as being part of the download. Because of this, he’s being sued. Paul is now in the strange world of copyright trolls, companies that produce or license content for the sole purpose of suing users who pirate it – even inadvertently. How did Paul get caught? And what is his recourse now that he’s been fingered as a pirate? The answers to those questions are mired in some of the most contentious legal wrangling ever and is the basis of an entire industry, one dedicated to producing Internet-based “bait cars” that allow copyright holders to see a trickle of money for even the arguably worst content imaginable.
First, a brief primer on BitTorrent. When a file, a document, say, is put on BitTorrent, a user makes it available as a seed. This seed is downloaded a few times by other users – peers – and then, once enough copies are available, the peers begin serving up parts of that file. Think of it as a group of people sharing a candle. The first person lights another person’s candle and so on. Eventually, the holder of the original flame is forgotten and the flame is self-perpetuating. While this metaphor isn’t completely accurate, it works well enough. According to Paul’s ISP, then, Paul’s computer held the flame for a brief period, serving up all or some of The Divide to other users. Whether this is true or not is the biggest problem in this sort of copyright law. If Paul served up a packet inadvertently, is it his fault? If he only served up one packet versus the entire file, is he at fault? And how can ISPs prove beyond a doubt that Paul is the culprit here? They can’t. The DMCA complaint Paul received came from R&D Film 1, LCC, represented by attorneys and of Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd. in Chicago. The complaint cited him by IP address and cited . In the case of The Pirate Bay, the file , who has seeded a number of videos and television programs from various “groups.” It is important to note that The Divide is still available for download.
Files produced by – in this case BHRG – differ in quality and availability. There are many versions of The Divide, including higher- and lower-resolution copies. But only this copy is seeing lawsuits thrown at it. If the lawsuit defendants had picked another copy, any other copy, they would have been in the clear. Clearly this particular 720p, high-resolution copy of The Divide is being watched. Every time someone shared a little bit of it, chances are one of the seeders “caught” the IP address of the requester. The seeder made a list, forwarded that list to the appropriate ISPs, and then prepared their case. The IP addresses are sent with a timestamp (which could be wrong) and, as we all know, IP addresses are ephemeral things. Again, Paul was no angel, but he got caught in a dragnet that had little to do with him. “If entrapment wasn’t done by government entities this would be entrapment,” said Robert Z. Cashman, a patent attorney who runs a .
Ross Dinerstein, the R and the D in R&D, is an indie film producer and a nice guy. You can see him He lives in Los Angeles and has the round, boyish face of a Hollywood business man focused more on doing deals than going gluten-free. He was executive producer for , a beautiful piece of indie documentary filmmaking that could be considered a masterpiece. I spoke to him and he laid out his case. “I’m a producer. I don’t have the bandwidth to chase pirates, so I hired a specialist to handle it,” he said. “As far as I know, [the people being sued] get trapped by stealing copyrighted material which is not a good idea.” It’s hard to dump the blame on Dinerstein or anyone like him. While he does see a small amount of money from these lawsuits, he has essentially outsourced their enforcement to a company called , a firm that rose to infamy for offering software products and anti-piracy services whose “evidence gathering techniques are far from optimal.” Attorney Jason Sweet told : GuardaLey did not respond to requests for an interview, and R&D Film 1 LLC’s counsel at Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd. said “No comment.” Disconnecting Dinerstein from GuardaLey is obviously problematic, but let’s assume, for the sake of sanity, that the movie was made in good faith and that his goal was to show people a good time. Who, then, is at fault? Dinerstein for wanting what is, by all rights, his? Or GuardaLay for essentially expressing a level of incompetence that would get most software services houses fired? Lawsuits like this one started cropping up in 2010 and have risen in intensity since. and search for copyright cases with the party name “Doe 1-” in any court. You’ll see quite a few cases, many of them dealing with exactly this type of situation.
Remember that it doesn’t have to be this way. The easiest way to have something removed from the Internet is through a simple DMCA filing. Takedown notices are addressed almost immediately, which is often a boon for copyright holders, but is also a , as was evidenced in a case against a WordPress user whose plagiarist requested a takedown notice for blog posts they had copied. There is obviously little monetary value in these notices, but they do remove offending content, for the most part, in a few keystrokes. It’s a method of first resort and makes the most sense for copyright holders. GuardaLey has a stable of law firms that send out these letters in hopes that customers will settle. If they don’t – if the cases go to court or they are ignored – they stand to lose money. The sweet spot, then, is in those too cowed not to react and too confused to find legal representation. “My folks just got served a subpoena,” wrote the relative of one of the victims. “They are elderly and I know did nothing wrong; possibly someone else using their IP address. I’m thinking either hiring an attorney as a shield, or doing nothing and praying it goes away. I will not have them appear in court or settle. What do you suggest?” Others, like a 16-year-old defendant, are worried the lawsuit will ruin their family. Still others see it as a scam. One user received a subpoena after watching a Mr. Rogers episode online. “There is no reason for them to come after me, my kids, or any of the other thousand viewers, unless stopping ‘piracy’ for copyright trolls is not their real intent.” Copyright trolling efforts like these are not new. Cashman has been following them for years. “Copyright trolls are generally production studios and/or they’re enterprising attorneys who have decided that it is more profitable for them to sue defendants and elicit multi-thousand-dollar settlements from accused defendants rather than sell tickets or copies of their copyrighted films at retail or discount prices,” he said. “A porn production company could make millions suing defendants rather than promoting $20 per-month memberships at their websites. For these reasons, these lawsuits in their post-Napster, post-Grokster form took shape.” But what right do these trolls have to ask for outrageous sums? In copyright law there is a duality. On one hand, you can say that the studio is out one paying customer – $20 at most for the ticket and a few bucks more for popcorn. On the other, you can say that the downloader has, inadvertently, become a pirate distributor. That’s partially why it’s easy for these guys to go after BitTorrent users (that and the ubiquity of the service.) “Their filings for copyright infringement are probably correct — if a downloader made an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted file, they could probably be held liable for copyright infringement. I am hedging on this statement because I would like to see the laws limited to those who enjoy a financial gain from this infringement, and I do not consider the ‘loss of a movie ticket or sale’ to be substantial enough to sue a defendant for $150,000,” said Cashman. So somehow Paul’s IP address got on R&D/GuardaLey’s list. They sent a letter to the ISP asking for the specific data pertaining to the accused user, and the ISP, thanks to the DMCA, is forced to comply. In fact, companies will cry “The DMCA made me do it” at the drop of a hat these days, another issue that frustrates content producers to no end. So what now?
“Don’t be fooled — these trolls can be fought using the same arguments as any of the others. An IP address still does not conclusively link to the subscriber as the downloader,” said Cashman. “Each of these cases suffered from the same issues which would prevent them from going to trial — lack of personal jurisdiction, improper joinder of accused defendants, and that there were clear patterns in the rulings of the judges across the U.S. where they were clearly misunderstanding what was the real intention of these copyright trolls, and they were denying motions to quash and attempts of the internet users to prevent the copyright trolls from obtaining their contact information,” he said. Jeffrey Antonelli, , told us that before those attacked do anything they should confirm that their computers are compromised or that a relative hasn’t been visiting The Pirate Bay without their knowledge. Then you have to gamble. Do you hire a lawyer and forge ahead or ignore the notice? “I have represented a number of people who were sued because they ignored the letters. It’s about trying to determine that chance, it’s difficult, and it would be helpful to have legal advice. You can be well-informed by reading the relevant sources. and are both good sources and both are being sued by some copyright trolls,” he said. Again, is this Dinerstein’s fault? No, said Antonelli. “Starting from the presumption that copyright owners – bona fide business owners that are providing content. With those assumptions, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad. I do have issues with the manner in which those people are doing their investigations/litigation and with the selection of people they actually decide to sue.” Antonelli said Paul is looking at a claim of about $500-$750. “Other law firms charge more, my firm is able to charge less. Litigation is quite a bit more expensive. Litigation can easily be up to $5,000-$6,000 and can quickly escalate to $50,000 if you’re the main defendant. It’s very burdensome. There should be strict rules on the ability to enforce copyrights through ISP subpoenas.” In the end, copyright trolling is a sneak attack on folks who may or may not be doing anything wrong. While certainly The Divide is a piece of intellectual property that deserves protection, things break down when it is used as bait to gather lucrative lawsuits. Entire film studios produce second-rate movies to, presumably, show on Netflix and other services and, sadly, use to power these lawsuits. While perhaps the The Divide isn’t such a movie, the chances look good. It appears to me as if these movie studios have been making second-rate movies for some time, more as a hobby as far as I’m concerned. Setting up a holding company and transferring the copyright to the holding company so that they could sue for copyright infringement appears to be a ‘business model’ of what is known as ‘IP monetization’ that lawyers are so excited about. “In other words, they say: ‘It’s a bad economy, so let’s threaten to, but not sue the pants off of anyone who downloads our content,’” he said. Sadly, for folks like Paul, sometimes that strategy works.
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Former Google AdSense Director, Kim Malone Scott, Leaves Dropbox After Just Four Months
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
We’re hearing from those familiar with the situation that Kim Malone Scott, an ex Apple and Google employee, has left Dropbox after about four months on the job. Upon her hiring, she was described as a . At Google, she was commonly referred to as the “ ,” a name she had given herself because she placed ads on pages that normally didn’t have them, mostly for small publishers. During her tenure at Google, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had called Scott’s credentials a “perfect Googler’s resume.” According to , Scott worked in “Operations and Online Sales” for Dropbox, with no other details or information about her role. With two years at Apple and six years at Google, it was clear that the hiring was an important one at the time. Recently, Scott shared on the site for Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In,” giving the advice: Never be afraid to call bs, especially when it’s sexist bs. We’ve also heard that this could have been partially a personal decision and one having to do with culture issues. We’ve reached out to Dropbox for comment and will update our story once we hear back. A Dropbox representative has confirmed Scott’s departure.
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Samsung To Open Retail Boutiques In 1,400 Best Buy Stores
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Samsung has thrown down another gauntlet in its battle with Apple. This time, the Korean electronics giant is going head-to-head with Apple stores by opening retail boutiques, called ‘Samsung Experience Shops,’ in 1,400 Best Buy locations by the beginning of June. Stores will start operating in all of Best Buy’s big-box stores by May 1 and at smaller stores by June 1, around the same time as the Galaxy S4’s release date in the second quarter of this year. The new stores will join Samsung’s . Samsung previously had no retail spaces of its own in the U.S. and its Best Buy stores are intended to help it grab customer eyeballs and dollars away from Apple and Microsoft’s own stores (Apple also has retail spaces in Best Buy). Each of Samsung’s boutiques and offer Samsung smartphones, tablets, laptops, cameras, and accessories. The Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung’s spaces will be larger than Apple’s and allow customers to purchase Samsung items without having to go through the main checkout line. Samsung hopes having its own boutique spaces will boost its brand recognition among U.S. customers and allow staffers to show how its smartphones, tablets, laptops, and TVs can work together, potentially boosting sales of devices. In turn, Best Buy may be able to gain an edge on competitors like Amazon.com, Wal-Mart and Target by offering boutiques where customers can see demos and try out products. Sales at Best Buy , its third straight annual decline.
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Huawei Says Security Concerns Will Hinder U.S. Growth, But It Still Expects Traction In Europe And Asia
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Huawei, the world’s second largest telecom gear marker after Ericsson, said that its U.S. growth will be hindered this year by U.S. security concerns. But Bob Cai, the Chinese company’s vice president in charge of wireless-network marketing, told that Huawei still expects its key wireless-network business to gain ground in Europe and Asia. Huawei has been dealt two major setbacks in the U.S. over the past half-year. In October, a U.S. said that Huawei and ZTE’s “provision of equipment to U.S. critical infrastructure could undermine core U.S. national-security interests,” a claim that both companies disputed. Then last week, Sprint Nextel and SoftBank after they merge. Huawei is counting on other overseas markets, as well as its domestic market in China, for revenue growth. In 2011, Huawei’s wireless network business accounted for 45.91 billion yuan (about $7.4 billion USD), or 23 percent of the company’s total revenue of 203.93 billion yuan. Seventy percent of its group revenue is generated abroad and the company says that its biggest markets are in Western Europe and emerging Asian markets like Indonesia. In Europe, Cai told the Wall Street Journal that Huawei has “already built trust” with carriers. Like smaller rival ZTE, Huawei is also . The country’s big three mobile carriers–China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom–are all busy building out their LTE infrastructure. Together, the three companies will spend 345 billion yuan ($56 billion USD) on expanding their 4G networks this year. Cai told the Wall Street Journal that last year Huawei made $1 billion in revenue from its LTE network business, and that the company expects that figure to double to about $2 billion this year. Overall, Huawei expects its mobile infrastructure unit to grow by at least 10 percent this year, after 11 percent growth in 2012. Despite the added challenge of U.S. security concerns, Huawei’s competitors like Ericsson over the past few years thanks to the poor economic climate. For instance, Ericsson’s 2012 group revenue was 227.78 billion Swedish kronor ($35.1 billion USD), almost flat when compared with its 2011 revenue of 226.92 billion kronor.
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BlackBerry’s Peculiar BBM Music Service Slated To Shut Down On June 2
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
BBM Music, I hardly knew ye (seriously, I never got the chance to play with it). In an email sent out to the service’s users earlier tonight, BlackBerry announced that it was officially pulling the plug on its curious on , though the email admits the date is “subject to change.” I say “curious” because BBM Music is markedly different than most other subscription music services we’ve seen for mobile devices. As the name sort of implies, BBM Music relies heavily on your BlackBerry social connections to make it worthwhile. For $4.99 a month you could download 50 tracks of our own, and in order to expand that library of tunes you had to invite your BBM contacts to join the service as well, netting you access to 50 songs in the process. Frankly, it was a concept that never seemed to click for me, but I could see where BlackBerry was coming from. Back when BBM Music first launched in 2011, rival streaming services like Rdio already offered more robust music options for those who wanted vast catalogues of music on the go, and Spotify came along to make the BlackBerry media landscape even more competitive. Still, BBM Music was cheaper and presumably intended to give users yet another reason to dig further into BBM — sure, chatting was great, but potentially getting a ton of music that your friends have curated? That’s not a shabby deal for $5 a month, though the terminally unpopular would probably disagree. I’ve reached out to BlackBerry for an official word on why BBM Music is getting the axe, and will update if/when they respond. That said, the news won’t come as a surprise to some: According to some , BlackBerry employees have been foretelling the service’s demise for a while now. It’s also worth noting that BlackBerry 10 users won’t be affected by this move as BBM Music never made the leap to the new OS. Then again, they’ve got plenty of tracks available for download in the BlackBerry World content, but the streaming side of things is a little hairier — Rdio hasn’t yet announced a BlackBerry 10 app, and Spotify either or release a BB10 app depending on who you listen to. Now that BBM Music is slated for a dip in the deadpool, what are the service’s current diehards to do? Well, there’s nothing to be done about those carefully cultivated playlists they’ve been working on for the past year and a half — they’ll disappear into the digital ether in short order. BlackBerry’s attempting to ease the transition though by offering each of those users 30 days of free Rdio access. I guess in the end the better mobile music model finally won.
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LinkMe Is An LED Smart Bracelet That Displays Scrolling Lines Of Text
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
is an LED smart bracelet that connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth and displays SMS and social media updates in text that scrolls across your wrist. Smartwatches and smart bracelets promise convenience – it’s easier to glance at a device on your wrist than it is to dig out your buzzing smartphone from your tightly fitting jeans. But so far, many of them have had boring, uninspired designs. For example, has an amazing complement of features. But it looks plastic and boring. I’d never be caught wearing that on my wrist. LinkMe is unabashedly beautiful. It’s a single chrome ring that clips around your wrist. The smart bracelet has a curved LED display that seamlessly blends in with the rest of the device. The display streams long lines of text in red or blue letters, like one of those big news tickers in Times Square. LinkMe can display anything that be relayed in a stream of text – SMS, social media updates, flight information, personal reminders and alerts. When it isn’t displaying messages, LinkMe defaults to displaying the time, so you can easily use it as a watch. But when it comes to functionality, the Pebble outstrips LinkMe in a number of ways. With its e-ink display, the Pebble can offer multiple watch faces and display limited graphics. It also can flash multiple lines of text at once. With LinkMe, you have to wait until the message or alert finishes scrolling across the bracelet. Still, there’s just something about LinkMe that makes me want to have it around my wrist. Maybe it’s just another case of aesthetics trumping functionality. Maybe this feeling will go away that fuses beauty with a healthy complement of features. But for now? I’m sold. A LinkMe can be had for a $99 contribution at their KickStarter . They’re pushing to raise $100,000 by May 5th. [vimeo 61420832 w=500 h=281]
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Zeel Relaunches As The Uber For Massage With New On-Demand, Mobile Booking Service
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
to bring the model to alternative healthcare providers. In other words, just as ZocDoc makes it easy to search for doctors based on specialty, proximity and insurance coverage and book appointments directly, Zeel aimed to do the same for the other half of the market: From massage therapists and personal trainers to nutritionists and acupuncturists. Since then, Zeel thousands of wellness providers and book thousands of appointments for a wide range of practitioners. However, during the past 18 months, one vertical in particular emerged as the most active and the most significant source of traffic: Massage. The team discovered, co-founder Samer Hamadeh tells us, that about half of its appointment requests were for massage, many in-home and that over 55 percent of those requests were for same-day service. Because the industry isn’t set up to capitalize on same-day requests, the co-founder says, the startup decided to abandon the horizontal approach and refocus its efforts on massage, specifically of the on-demand and in-home variety. Zeel soft-launched its on-demand massage service in December, but eager to become a mobile-first product in the same way Uber provides on-demand car services, Zeel began developing iPhone and Android apps. Today, is officially announcing its new, massage-focused product and releasing its iOS app (with Android to follow next month), allowing anyone and everyone to book same-day, in-home massage appointments while on-the-go. Through its app, Zeel now enables users to select a 60 or 90-minute massage, specify whether they prefer a male or female massage therapist, decide between Swedish and deep tissue massage, and indicate their location and preferred appointment time or time window. When they hit “Book now,” the request goes out to nearby, available therapists one at a time, much like requests to Uber drivers, until one of the Zeel therapists accepts the request. Hamadeh says that the over-arching motive behind its new product is to, simply put, make massage accessible to everyone. Furthermore, it aims to solve the hassle around booking a massage — having to call around and schedule in advance, for example. The startup has recruited over 100 licensed and vetted massage therapists who are available on-demand and will confirm appointments and be on their way within minutes of booking your appointment. Zeel is also attempting to take some of the hassle out of the process by offering a set price (including tax and tip), which is charged directly to users’ credit cards. And, because in-home massage inherently has the potential for all kinds of creepiness, the co-founder assures us that all of its therapists are vetted (in person), licensed, certified, insured and own their own portable massage tables. As to why Zeel decided to limit its potential market by focusing on massage, rather than the alternative? Hamadeh hopes that by focusing on one vertical and doing it really well Zeel will be able to build a more meaningful (and useful) service than trying to be everything to everyone. In turn, he tells us that there are currently over 290,000 licensed massage therapists in the U.S., 73 percent of whom are solo practitioners. Furthermore, 41 million Americans receive at least one massage each year, while the average customer books six appointments per year. By standardizing the price and removing the friction around booking and payments, Zeel hopes to be able to increase the frequency with which we indulge ourselves in a little massage. Particularly because, in truth, 44 percent of massage appointments are booked for medical and health reasons, many of which are ongoing. Hamadeh says, in its experience thus far, Zeel has found that 55 percent of in-home requests are same-day, but only 25 to 35 percent of those are actually booked. As a result, that market opportunity could be double or triple the amount of current massages. The other issue is that, when most people decide to book a massage, they want to be lying on the table within a few hours of booking. The reality is, the co-founder says, that appointments booked more than a day in advance on the old Zeel system tended to get cancelled or changed. And, on the therapist’s side, 30 to 40 percent of their day is free, and the average therapist has to work two or three jobs and doesn’t have health insurance — so even if an appointment means traveling far (and is inconvenient) most therapists will take it anyway. By using the Uber model, Zeel is able to help therapists book more appointments and organize their day in a way that doesn’t require them to travel 50 miles to an appointment, while removing the hassle of phone calls, and back and forths over SMS with customers. Of course, Zeel is hardly the only place or service to offer massage. There are a slew of options for people looking for a massage therapy solution, whether it be spas, health clubs, gyms and so on. There are in-home options, too, as people can turn to sites like Thumbtack and Craigslist to look for therapists. The problem is that most spas don’t offer on-demand, let alone in-home massage, and the marketplaces that do offer in-home service can be pretty sketchy or require you to submit a request to a therapist and hope he or she calls you at some point. On the customer side, it’s hard to verify that the person about to come to your apartment isn’t a serial killer, but Hamadeh assures us that his vetting process is solid and that all of Zeel’s therapists have stellar educational credentials, current state licenses, and excellent prior and current employment. Just as important, he says, is that the same safety issue applies for therapists, too. When customers sign up for Zeel, the startup uses a “major identity verification agency” to confirm their legal name, birthday, location, legal home address and so on. If things don’t check out, no massage for you. Only verified customers can book appointments, the co-founder tells us, in an attempt to provide extra security measures for therapists. And, on the customer side, Zeel vets and curates its roster of therapists itself with the goal of decreasing the creepiness factor on both sides of the equation. Zeel is initially only available in the New York City area, where the base price of a massage in Manhattan will costs $130 (and $120 in the outer boroughs) before tax and tip. While this seems high, Hamadeh says that it prices Zeel’s service favorably compared to spas like Equinox, Bliss, Four Seasons, Exhale as well as other in-home solutions in NYC. In fact, the team debated launching in New York first because of the pricing factor (everything is more expensive in the Big Apple). But, the co-founder said that the price of a Zeel massage in Manhattan will likely be the most expensive in the country. To that point, the startup plans to launch in a new city each quarter and will be coming to California in the fall. For readers in NYC looking to test out the new service, using the code “TECHCRUNCH” will get you a $25 discount on your first appointment. $1.5 million in outside capital to date from a number of investors, including Prolog Ventures, a life sciences and healthcare venture firm, former Midway Games chairman and LogMeIn board member Ken Cron, long-time healthcare investor Esther Dyson, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Ravi Mhatre and former Facebook director of monetization and current CRO at Pinterest, Tim Kendall, among others. Zeel , on .
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Fancy Some Three-Dimensional Wellness? Recipe Kit Service HelloFresh Partners With Weight Loss App Noom
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Arguably, eating healthily takes both motivation time. And in what’s being billed as “a world first, three-dimensional wellness experience” (presumably with a straight face), the recipe kit subscription service is partnering with weight loss coaching app to tackle the problem from both ends. Available first in the U.S. but eventually rolling out in other parts of the world, users of Noom will be able to subscribe to weight loss meal plans designed and delivered by HelloFresh, consisting of the recipe, step-by-step instructions and all the required fresh ingredients, promising a healthy meal that can be cooked in under 30 minutes. Priced at $69 plus tax per-week for three two-portion meals, the HelloFresh offering shows up in the Noom app (available for Android), although the customer relationship — subscriptions and payments — are solely managed by Noom, with HelloFresh powering the offline elements of recipe design, ingredient sourcing and product delivery. To the end-user, it’s almost entirely branded as a Noom feature, with the only giveaway being a “powered by the award-winning HelloFresh team” tagline. As we’d expect, the partnership does, however, include a revenue share element with HelloFresh. To that end, Noom currently claims 6.7 million users of its app worldwide — it isn’t breaking out numbers for the U.S. specifically, where the HelloFresh partnership will initially debut — so there’s quite a lot of potential for up-selling the new HelloFresh-powered recipe kit subscription. The integration goes a little deeper, too. Along with what is essentially a white label version of HelloFresh inside of the Noom app, each recipe kit delivered comes with a unique QR code that can be scanned so that key nutritional information is logged and updated in a user’s personal Noom weight loss plan. Thus, the three-dimensionalness is complete. New York-based Noom is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Qualcomm Ventures, Harbor Pacific Capital, and M8 Capital. It claims to be the leading weight loss app on Android, providing such as the ability to track daily food intake via simple food categories — green, yellow, red — therefore omitting the need to count calories. In addition, users can track their motion with the app’s built-in pedometer and are given daily tasks to get them taking in some exercise. So it’s part quantified-self and part good old-fashioned nagging. HelloFresh, headquartered in Berlin, Germany and incubated out of the Samwer brothers’ startup factory Rocket Internet, competes with the likes of and in the U.S., and is also available in Germany, Netherlands, UK, France, and Australia. It raised a new $10 million funding round from Vorwerk Ventures, along with original backers Rocket Internet, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Kinnevik.
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What The Facebook Phone Actually Means
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Ambient intimacy, accelerated social life, thawed relations between Google and Facebook, and an iPhone that looks impersonal by comparison. These are just a few of the short-term ripple effects of the Facebook “Phone” project to be unveiled April 4th. In this video, I recap leaked intel from my sources and , show photos of the phone itself plus its software, and discuss why you might even care. To some people and a lot of businesses, it’s going to be a big deal over the next year. Even bigger if it succeeds. Watch the video to see why. …And then there’s the long-term plan. . Where it holds the hands of the developing world and brings it online, social from the start. But that’s another story.
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Skype And Dropbox Fix Redirect Security Hole That Could’ve Hacked Your Facebook
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Nir Goldshlager just saved your identity. One of the world’s top white hat security researchers, Goldshlager this week helped Skype and Dropbox fix a critical security flaw that could have let hackers take control of their users’ Facebook accounts. Tomorrow will detail how he found the exploit, but he gave TechCrunch the early heads up. Here’s how hackers exploit the hole. First the good news. Since it was reported responsibly, it appears that no one fell victim to this flaw, known as an “open redirect vulnerability.” The issue essentially occurs when a website doesn’t validate the URL where it sends a user and their access tokens. Normally sites verify that the URLs they send you to are either owned by them or one of their trusted partners. But if they don’t, a hacker who knows someone’s user ID and that they’ve granted permissions to a vulnerable site could visit www.MySiteIsVulnerable.com?UserID55555redirect=www.MaliciousSite.com and steal that person’s access tokens, allowing them to take actions as if they were the hacked user. Naughty identity thieves. I n this case, both metrics.skype.com and Dropbox.com were failing to validate redirects, leaving them vulnerable. , a hacker would first need to know someone who had connected their Facebook accounts to one of these sites, say metrics.skype.com. Then they could find that person’s Facebook User ID through the Graph API explorer. If the hacker then punched in the right metrics.skype.com… URL with the user ID attached, followed by a redirect to a malicious site they control, Skype would deliver the victim’s Facebook access token. This would let the hacker do anything the user had granted Skype the ability to do, such as post to their wall, pull their personal information, and more. There is no faster way to get unfriended than by spewing spam. Goldshlager discovered this flaw, but rather than exploit it himself or publish it for other hackers to use, he responsibly reported it to Skype, Dropbox and Facebook, who’ve all confirmed it’s now fixed. In Skype’s case, the issue was actually with one of its partners that builds software for the app, which they fixed together. Though the bug wasn’t Facebook’s fault, the company tells me: We applaud the security researcher who brought this issue to the attention of the affected organizations and for responsibly reporting the bug to our White Hat Program. These bugs were triggered from open redirect vulnerabilities in domains that were authorized for OAuth. While not a Facebook bug, we have and will continue to work with our OAuth partners to prevent this exploit. Due to the responsible reporting of this issue to Facebook and the affected companies, we have no evidence that users were impacted by this issue. The whole situation is nothing new for the Israeli security researcher. Goldshlager has been on the top of for the last two years because he’s reported than anyone else. He also just started a White Hat security company called that helps clients find bugs before crooks do. Oh, and the guy keeping you safe on the web also has an awesome name. So this drink of spicy cinnamon Schnapps is on us, Mr. Goldshlager. Keep hacking for good.
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The Idiocy Of The Social Animal
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
As we move closer to the launch of the ( ) Facebook phone, let’s examine just what the social network and its ilk have created. Millions of us use these new tools to joke, flirt and share memories, but just as many of us use these tools much to our disadvantage. In some ways, however, that is making things better for all of us. posted surveillance video of a terrible mugging that took place not far from my home in Brooklyn. The video (don’t watch it, it’s not important here) clearly showed the victim going down the stairs and then the attacker coming up behind her wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the insignia, the nickname “Stugotz” (Italian slang for “dick”) and the number 27. There were a few more clues as to the mugger’s identity, but those were the major ones. The woman sustained minor injuries, according to Gawker, but the attack was particularly jarring and disgusting. Minutes after the Gawker post hit, . It was all there: the hoodie, the logo, a set of keys, a purple bracelet, and the thief’s yutzy mug preening from a set of clear Facebook photos that could have come right from the “how not to be a frat boy who mugs people” playbook. Today Stugotz, aka Aidan Folan, 21, was taken into custody in Brooklyn. Aren’t we lucky, then, that this idiot shared his information with such abandon? The average person, myself included, wouldn’t see Folan’s Facebook account as very unique at all. It’s a dossier of a life that apparently led him to rob and beat a woman on the subway. If this had been any other 21-year-old, Folan’s photos of himself cavorting with his friends and calling out his bros in the frat would be absolutely normal. But these are the posts of a criminal, and of late we’re seeing more and more of this. We’re entering a new era of documentation. In the hours after the Newtown shootings, we found ourselves clicking on links purporting to connect us to the shooter’s Facebook page. Police routinely use Facebook and other social posts to catch criminals stupid enough to snap themselves with the phones of their prey. Internet vigilantism isn’t new, and this isn’t what I’m on about here. This is about the dangers of exposing yourself too much in one way – or this dark other way. Is it right and good that Folan should be called out and caught for his misdeeds? Absolutely. But taken to the other extreme, these same tools can be – and are – used against the innocent. It’s easy to write a jeremiad against oversharing in the social era. It’s been done before and will be done again. However, as we watch fools and villains hoisted on their own petards again and again, why can’t we learn something? Why can’t we treat Facebook like a mini social club where our relationships are splayed flat and squirming in other people’s browsers. Or, more important, why do we? These questions will be answered by us all over the next few decades. Once we realize that our online presence is as palpable, in the end, as our physical one, I suspect more of us will pull back. I’ve already started slowing my sharing, opting instead for private sharing and some jokes on Tumblr. I want idiots like Folan to be exposed, and it pleases me to no end to see him get his comeuppance. But the sword cuts both ways. In a way it’s good that the social animal is so persistent within us. It lets fools be foolish on a big stage, and when they hurt someone it lets vigilante justice roll over them. But, at the same time, we are not always fools nor are we always foolish. Sometimes being the social animal is a detriment. It’s up to us to know when.
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Seagate Ships World’s First 4TB HD With Four 1TB Platters
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
will be shipping a 4TB hard drive that has the distinction of being the world’s first to include a 1TB per platter design. This basically means that each spinning disk in the hard drive has a capacity of 1TB, and that there are four of them. It’s not everyday that you can claim to that have something that’s the “world’s first”, so don’t be too hard on Seagate. This certainly isn’t the first hard drive to have a 4TB capacity, but apparently the new 1TB per platter design significantly increases the hard drive’s performance over the competition. It consumes 35 percent less power than comparable drives on the market with 4TB capacities, and at 145MB/s, it has the highest average data rate as well. But most importantly, the new design will also bring down costs. A hard drive in an external casing can be had for $212, while just the bare drive will cost around $190. Bring on the terabytes, Seagate. My body and my illegally downloaded movies are ready.
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Owen Thomas Joins ReadWrite As Editor-in-Chief, Says He Will Take The Site ‘Back To Our Roots’
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
just announced that Owen Thomas, previously the West Coast Editor at , has joined (a tech blog that ) as editor-in-chief. I that Thomas (who’s an old boss of mine — he was executive editor at VentureBeat back when I was the assistant editor) was in talks for the position, though all that Say representatives would tell me at the time was that they were talking to a number of candidates. Formerly called ReadWriteWeb, the blog was founded by Richard MacManus back in 2003, and over the past decade it has been home to a number of great tech writers (including Frederic Lardinois, Sarah Perez and Alex Williams, who are all currently writing for TechCrunch). Last fall, the company . to take a position at marketing software company HubSpot. In some ways, Thomas and Lyons are similar choices: They have lots of media experience (yes, Owen, that’s my polite way of saying that you’re old), but they can also be snarky and controversial. “Owen is a brilliant writer with great experience covering every aspect of the technology industry,” said Say SVP and Editorial Director Kate Lewis in a press release. “He has a distinct point-of-view and a cleverness that makes his work resonate both inside and outside of his community.” ReadWrite has also , in which Owen is described as “a shockingly nice fellow.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but he is actually pretty nice, and that does surprise some people, especially since he used to be the editor of Valleywag. “One thing we’re definitely going to do is go back to our roots,” Thomas told me. In other words, he wants to explore the idea embedded in the company’s name — what it means now that “everyone is a participant, everyone’s a builder today.” When Lyons joined as editor, he told us that he wanted to make ReadWrite more fun. I pointed out that people are probably expecting that from Thomas too, but he said, “I have my serious side, Anthony.” He added that he definitely wants to make sure the site has a sense of humor, and that sometimes being funny or snarky is the most appropriate response to tech news: “You have to laugh so you don’t cry.”
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Disney Shuts Down LucasArts Just 154 Days After Acquiring It
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Pour one out for the tonight, my fellow gamers. A sage pillar of the industry has fallen. Just 154 days after acquiring LucasArts as part of their larger, $4B acquisition of Lucasfilm, Disney has dissolved the classic video game development company. Beginning today, Disney will continue to license out the LucasArts properties (namely ), but has ceased the development of all internal projects. Some projects (such as the incredible looking ) with other development houses, but their status is currently up in the air. While the move was not unforeseen (the company’s last few games haven’t been very successful, and rumors of projects being shuttered have trickled in since the acquisition), that doesn’t make today’s news any less disheartening. A part of my childhood — a part of an entire generation of gamer’s collective childhood, really — goes down with LucasArts. To the 150 people , and to everyone who had a part in the LucasArts legacy, we thank you. Thank you for bringing us into the world of Guybrush Threepwood and . Thank you for and , two games which helped to prove that video games could be , and somehow remain funny to this very day. Thank you for and . While we may never get the sequels that we’ve been collectively clamoring for for well over a decade, these games helped to introduce the gaming world to project lead Tim Schafer and opened the doors for his company, Double Fine Productions (the folks behind Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, and one of the ) Thank you for , a game that got me through a particularly terrible flu in the third grade and re-sparked my then waning interest in computers. Thank you for bringing Sam and Max into the digital world. Though they live on at Telltale Games (which, like Double Fine, is a team founded by LucasArts alum), LucasArts was the first company to see Sam and Max’s potential as more than just a lil’ indie comic book. Thank you for (co-developed with Pandemic Studios, also since shuttered), , the series, for your part in Knights Of The Old Republic, and for countless other memories. LucasArts had its hits and it had its misses, but their legacy extends beyond any one game, brand, or series. Their games defined genres, and much of the talent they nurtured throughout the 90s has gone on to define the entire industry. So long, LucasArts, and thanks for all the
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 | null |
Brian Pokorny Returns To SV Angel As A General Partner After Airbnb Talent Deal
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Brian Pokorny, who led photo-sharing service Daily Booth and Batch into a talent acquisition by Airbnb, is returning to SV Angel as a general partner. He has a long history with the firm. He’s been a strategic partner of SV Angel since 2009, before he left to be CEO of DailyBooth. He has also worked with Ron Conway on angel investing since 2006. Pokorny personally has stakes in companies like Twitter, Square, OMGPOP, Milo, Chomp, TweetDeck, Circle, Bump, Posterous, Milk, Couple, Elepath, and MessageMe. “Investing feels very natural for me,” Pokorny said. “You get to see a variety of things and you get to be very close to startups at an early stage.” Before working with SV Angel the first time, he worked at Google. Through that, being CEO of Daily Booth and being acquired into Airbnb, he says he’s seen companies at every phase from early stage to the hyper-growth period and then into becoming a large, mature corporation. “My passion kind of lies with early-stage companies and entrepreneurs,” he said, adding that his experience running DailyBooth gave him the “founders’ perspective. You’re learning a tremendous amount from hiring, recruiting engineers, managing a product and managing a launch.” A YC-backed company, DailyBooth . Pokorny later led a big strategic change inside the startup . “DailyBooth was a web-first company, but the user behavior was front-of-the-camera behavior and that moved to mobile phones with the front-facing camera,” he said. “Then Path and Instagram launched and we had lots of competitors around that time.” and Pokorny worked on recruiting and other community and local projects before coming back to SV Angel. SV Angel’s founder and managing partner David Lee also just sent an e-mail to LPs about Pokorny’s return. Here it is below: I am thrilled to welcome (back) [Brian Pokorny](https://twitter.com/brianp) to SV Angel! He will join as a General Partner starting today. Many people in the tech community already know Brian, a.k.a. “Coach”. He was most recently the CEO of DailyBooth/Batch, a startup that was acquired by AirBnB. Prior to DailyBooth, Brian and I worked with Ron as a Partner for SV 1 on investment decisions and adding value to portfolio companies. Thus he is stepping back into a familiar role. However he returns with a wealth of operational and startup knowledge in his 3 years at a startup. This experience will be invaluable insight for our portfolio founders. Many of the best young founders today will already attest that he’s he’s become a true “Coach” and trusted advisor to many entrepreneurs. Brian has been angel investing since 2006 and reviewing investment opportunities since 2004. Having seen so many opportunities, he has unique insight into the trends and cycles related to the internet. Some of his personal angel investments include Twitter, Square, OMGPOP, Milo, Chomp, Tweetdeck, Circle, Bump, Posterous, Milk, Couple, Elepath, and MessageMe. On a personal note, I’ve known Brian since 2005 and we became friends through working together at Google. And so it great for me to do business with a friend. Welcome back, “Coach”! -David
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Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine That Will Soon Power Chrome And Chrome OS
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Google just that it is forking and launching this fork as . As Google , Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and “a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future. As Google’s VP of Engineering Linus Upson and Alex Komoroske, Google Product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told me yesterday, the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem. Komoroske noted that when it comes to working with the other companies involved in the WebKit project, the “collaboration has been fantastic.” This decision clearly wasn’t made lightly. Indeed, as Upson stressed when I talked to him yesterday, “management asked a lot of hard questions” about this move, but in the end, the decision was made in order to reduce the technical complexity of evolving Google’s rendering engine in the direction the team wanted to go in. Specifically, Komoroske noted, Chromium’s multi-process architecture is very different from the rest of WebKit (Chromium is the open-source project behind Chrome and Chrome OS). Having to integrate Google’s way of doing things with WebKit and what the rest of the WebKit partners were doing was “slowing everybody down,” Komoroske said. As an open-source project, both Chromium and Blink are open to outside committers, though as is typical for these kinds of projects, they’ll have to be to become project members. For now, WebKit and Blink pretty much look the same, but Google expects that they will evolve in very different directions over time. Komoroske, for example, would like to run , but that’s something that’s very difficult to do with WebKit right now. For now, though, developers won’t notice too much of a difference as most of the work will focus on internal architectural improvements. Google says, for example, that it will be able to “remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat.” Over time, Google says, this will results in a “healthier codebase” and lead “to more stability and fewer bugs.” The WebKit project was started by Apple after it forked the KDE project’s open-source for its Safari browser. In an unusual move – and after a lot of back and forth between the KHTML team and Apple – Apple announced in 2005 that it would open source WebKit, and Google then adapted it for its Chrome browser. Interestingly, Google actually used a forked version of WebKit in the early days of Chromium but later with the rest of the project. In this context, it’s worth remembering that all of the different vendors who currenly build WebKit-based browsers already implement it (and often use their own JavaScript engine, too). Currently, the majority of WebKit reviewers are from Google (95), with Apple coming in second (59), followed by a number of other companies, including Blackberry, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Adobe and Netflix. Google is also currently responsible for the to the WebKit repository, so it’ll be interesting to see how the Google exit from this project will affect WebKit as a whole. As a Google spokesperson told me today, the Blink team members can still contribute to WebKit “if they desire,” though it’s probably a safe bet that few of them will have the time and energy to do so. A few weeks ago, Opera that it would stop developing its own engine and switch to , too, by adopting Chromium as the basis for its browsers. It’s not clear what ramification today’s announcement will have for Opera, but we’ve reached out to the company and asked for a statement. When Opera made this move, many developers feared that we’d soon face a WebKit monoculture (especially on the mobile web). Now that Google is developing Blink, we can probably expect the pace of innovation to pick up again. Indeed, Komoroske told me that Google expects that its move away from WebKit will also help other vendors to develop WebKit faster, given that Google’s own implementation of the engine was very different from that of other vendors. : Why did Google call the new rendering engine Blink? Upson told me it’s obviously supposed to signify how the focus here is on speed and simplicity. Browser developers, however, also tend to have a tendency to have a bit of fun with their names. Chrome, for example, is all about making the “chrome” disappear as much as possible and Blink, he told me, is meant to remind people of the good old (and annoying) tag the Netscape Navigator introduced in the 90s.
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Another Bitcoin Wallet Service, Instawallet, Suffers Attack, Shuts Down Until Further Notice
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
Bitcoin’s wild surge in value has made it even more of an attractive target for hackers. Another until it changes its security architecture. The crypto-currency, which currently trades at $129.90 to the dollar, has risen by almost fourfold in the last month, as and a banking crisis in Cyprus helped send Bitcoin’s value skyward. But that’s also increased the load of hacking attacks on all of the major exchanges and Bitcoin service providers. The thing is that without a trusted third-party payments processor, Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and happen anonymously. So it’s almost impossible to reclaim losses after theft, making wallets for the crypto-currency an ideal target for online thieves. It’s not clear how many customers Instawallet had or how much it is holding on behalf of others. Bitcoin Magazine said in late February that while Instawallet was one of the easiest services to use, it used a “URL as password” mechanism for protection. Instawallet says it is going to open a claims process for any customers who stored funds with the service. If there are multiple claims for the same URL, they’ll presume that the first claim filed is the legitimate one. (Scary, indeed!) INSTAWALLET SERVICE NOTICE The Instawallet service is suspended indefinitely until we are able to develop an alternative architecture. Our database was fraudulently accessed, due to the very nature of Instawallet it is impossible to reopen the service as-is. In the next few days we are going to open the claim process for Instawallet balance holders to claim the funds they had stored before the service interruption. Important information on claims submission: For the first 90 days we will accept claims for individual Instawallets. Your wallet’s URL and key will be used to pre-populate a form to file the claim.
After 90 days, if no other claim has been received for the same url, your Instawallet balance under 50 BTC will be refunded. If several claims have been filed for the same url, we will process those claims on a case by case basis, under the presumption that the claim we received first belongs to the legitimate balance holder.
Claims for wallets that hold a balance greater than 50 BTC will be processed on a case by case and best efforts basis. Instawallet is certainly not the first to have a major suspension. Two years ago, one of the oldest wallets, MyBitcoin, Today, one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, Mt. Gox, also said that
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After Being Acquired By Google, Shipping Service Bufferbox Is Preparing A Bay Area Launch
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 |
, the Y Combinator company based in Canada that aimed to fix all of the issues that we have with receiving packages, has started to tease out a San Francisco Bay Area launch. Google acquired the company with little or no discussion about the future plans for the product. It’s clear that this could be a huge part of Google’s . Want to pick something up from a Bufferbox instead of having it brought directly to you? No problem. Middle men are completely cut out. The service has been operating without interruption in the greater Toronto area, but this area of California would be more than just a test. We know that the current package , and the government-funded postal service is pulling back on things like…delivering on the weekend. Google is clearly getting into the space in a big way, and the tease on , which probably picked up my browsing location, says it all: Right now, all you can do is give them your email address to “pre-register,” which gives Google a pretty good idea of the demand for the service. We’ve reached out to Google for more details, and will update if we do hear something more. This is definitely a space that we’re closely, as another Y Combinator company doing something similar, Swapbox, .
Instead of shipping something to your address, it goes to your Bufferbox, so that you can pick it up whenever you like. Right now, when you have something shipped to you and miss the delivery person, you’re pretty much screwed and have to wait for them to come back, or worse, go pick up the item yourself at a factory. If your package does get delivered, it just sits on your doorstep, being gawked at by your neighbors. This is a bit similar to the notion of having a P.O. box, but it isn’t a box or address that is static. You can get deliveries to any of the locations that you want. Additionally, these things should be available in the open, so you can get your packages at any time of the day or night, rather than before the post office closes. As we know, testing things out in the Bay Area is something that every company out here likes to do, including Google. This could be a booming business for the Mountain View company, as this is something that both consumers and small businesses would use repeatedly. It’s also a service that could be integrated into all of its current offerings. Imagine getting shipping notifications dropped into Gmail or your regular notification bar the second that it hits your Bufferbox. Or, imagine the tracking capabilities that Google could unleash, slapping the whereabouts of your package on Google Maps in realtime. That would be cool. [Photo credit: ]
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Samsung Expects 1Q2013 Earnings Of $7.7B, Up 53% Thanks To Smartphone Sales
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
Samsung that it expects to post first quarter operating profit of about 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion USD), up 53 percent from the 5.7 trillion won operating profit it earned a year earlier. The South Korean tech giant also said that its sales likely rose to between 51 trillion won and 53 trillion won from 45.3 trillion won a year earlier. Sales of its more than 30 smartphones models helped increase shipments to a record high in the first quarter despite the post-holiday shopping slump that hit rival Apple. Five analysts said that Samsung likely shipped 68 million to 70 million smartphones, up from 63 million in the fourth quarter of 2012. In comparison, iPhone shipments likely fell 30 percent to the 30 million range from 47.8 million in the fourth quarter, the analysts said. Earnings have grown on sales of the Galaxy S and Note series, but analyst Lee Sun-tae of NH Investment & Securities told Reuters that Samsung will probably begin to rely increasingly on mid-tier handsets like the Rex and Galaxy Pop in order to keep momentum going in sales as competition in the high-end market ramps up. The lower-priced phones will also help the company, which currently manufactures more than 30 smartphone models, compete in emerging markets. “The first quarter will be the bottom of its earnings cycle for this year, and things will only get better from here as it rolls out new mobile products,” said Lee. Samsung has already enjoyed record breaking profits for five quarters in a row, but 42 analysts surveyed by Reuters said that the Galaxy S4, which will be released later this month, may boost earnings in this quarter up to an all-time high of 9.7 trillion won. On the other hand, some analysts say the rising production cost of higher-end devices may chip into Samsung’s margins. The Galaxy S4’s new features “could potentially put pressures on their overall smartphone margins. The big cost drivers are the improved HD resolution AMOLED touchscreen, quad-core applications processor and memory,” IHS iSuppli senior analyst Wayne Lam .
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Couldn’t Make It To SXSW? Now You Can Learn About Google Glass And The Mirror API On YouTube
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpWmGX55a40&w=640&h=360] I’d wager that most of you reading this didn’t make it out to Austin for SXSW, and even fewer of you still have ever gotten some hands-on time with Google’s ambitious Glass project. On the off chance that you’ve been spending these past few weeks agonizing over all the juicy Glass tidbits you missed out on by not being there, you can rest easy — Google has posted the full video of its 50 minute Glass session . The talk — titled “Building New Experiences with Glass” featured Senior Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan giving attendees (and now you) a brief rundown on what it’s actually like using Google Glass. We’ve seen these sorts of hands-on impressions , but Jordan’s session managed to give attendees a clearer idea of what the Glass interface actually looks like while he’s rubbing away at the side-mounted trackpad or checking out updates from his Google+ pals. More importantly, Jordan’s session provided those on-site developers a glimpse at what it actually takes to build services for the head-mounted display. In it, he made multiple references to how simple the development process actually was (it’s “not complex,” as he puts it), but there’s more than enough meat here to give potential Glass developers a taste of what they’re in for. In the end though, Jordan was bullish on what Glass means for how we as users interact with our gadgetry — he didn’t go as far as saying traditional touchscreens were “emasculating” like , but he pointed out that current modes of interaction tend to separate us from the events and experiences of our lives. “It feels like tech is often getting in the way more than it needs to,” Jordan remarked. “And that’s what we’re addressing with Project Glass — it’s so that you can still have access to the technology you love, but it doesn’t take you out of the moment.” Jordan and his employers at Google may think we’ll love Glass, but the real jury has yet to weigh in. While Google is prepping Glass for a widespread consumer release at the end of this year, it has also reached out to thousands of would-be Glass Explorers about claiming their own $1,500 tester units. So far the search giant has been exceedingly careful about who has gotten to play with its vision of the future, but that’s all about to change in short order.
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Ultra-Hot Secret Sharing App Whisper Raises $3 Million From Lightspeed, Trinity, And Others
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
If you haven’t heard of yet, get ready to. It’s the latest social app to capture the attention of a huge — and growing — audience of users, as well as the attention of a group of investors. So far, the startup has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others. At the heart of Whisper’s app is the ability to anonymously share secrets with others. Those secrets take the form of photos that users can overlay text on top of. It looks a lot like the long-running website, which has been running for years, but Whisper brings in a whole bunch of features that make it into a more full-fledged social network. Whisper co-founder Michael Heyward told me by phone that the app was developed as a side project at secure messaging startup . Developing it with co-founder Brad Brooks, he saw Whisper as a way to enable users to share parts of their lives that they didn’t feel comfortable putting on social networks that were tied to their real identity. “When you look at any of these identity-based social networks, people are so concerned about their image that they only post really positive things,” Heyward told me. The result is that people drastically overestimate the happiness of the other people around them, while underestimating the problems that they share. “We saw a huge white space of things that people were not publishing, and wanted to give people a place to share these things that they wouldn’t feel comfortable putting out on social networks.” So Whisper was born. While it has some of the spirit of PostSecret, the real-time, mobile aspect of the app enables its users a way to communicate with one another that PostSecret never provided. In addition to providing immediate tools for replying publicly to other users, it also gives users the option of messaging each other privately — if they’re willing to pay for it. Putting private messaging behind a pay wall not only has helped to drive revenue for the startup, but more importantly, it ensured the quality of the content that users shared. Heyward says the team made the decision to make messaging a paid feature more as a way to deter people from using the platform for solicitations or as a personal marketplace. There’s also a location aspect to the app. Along with being able to see Whispers that are most popular and those which are newest, users can also see those which have been posted “Nearby.” Heyward tells me that Nearby is a relative term. The app is architected so that the radius of Whispers dubbed nearby is determined by the volume that have been posted, so that users should never feel like they’re in an empty room. While trying to remain somewhat under the radar, the founding team has been building its user base, trying to spread the word mostly on college campuses and through university newspapers. But it’s also seeing pickup with other types of users, most notably with members of the military, including many in active duties in the war zones of the Middle East. Nevertheless, with a limited amount of actual marketing, the app has grown extraordinarily fast. According to Heyward, the app has seen its number of users and posts doubling every month since publicly launching last November. And at the same time, it’s seeing its absolute number of page views and messages ramping up, as well. Whisper saw more than a billion page views on the app last month, and has about 800,000 private messages sent each day. Users are incredibly engaged, opening the app on average about six times a day and spending more than a half hour checking out content through the app out of each 24. So with all that usage, it’s no big surprise that investors jumped on the opportunity to back Whisper. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the company’s $3 million Series A round, which also included investors like Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein. Lightspeed partner Jeremy Liew said the firm moved really fast after seeing the app’s traction and meeting the team. Lightspeed first noticed Whisper in the App Store on a Monday and Liew met with the team the next day. By Friday they had a term sheet ready to sign, with Liew flying to L.A. on Saturday to finalize the deal. At the time it invested, Whisper was doing about 500 million page views per month, with each session being about 20 page views. “When you see that sort of engagement, it shows that the content really is compelling,” Liew wrote in an email. Liew compared his interest in the application to a tiny little company called Snapchat that his firm . For Liew, being able to provide a differentiator that is orthogonal to what Facebook stands for — i.e. creating a “journal of record for your life” through your real identity — is an important part of doing social in a way that Facebook can’t replicate. “With Snapchat, we saw much more real and authentic engagement than Facebook or Twitter or Instagram because you weren’t being ‘held to’ your photos and messages since they disappeared,” Liew wrote by email. “With Whisper you get much more real and authentic posts than FB or Twitter or Instagram because you weren’t being ‘held to’ it because of the anonymity. In both cases it makes for really compelling content.” So will Whisper be the next Snapchat? While it’s grown quickly over the first several months of downloads, it doesn’t necessarily play in the same arena. And the Whisper team of 10, with some VC backing behind it and revenues from messaging, is looking to continue to expand. The app is currently only on iOS, and according to App Annie, downloads have stalled a bit. But Whisper is looking to add Android soon. Once that happens, it’ll open up to a whole new group of users who don’t currently have access to it. At that point, the sky’s the limit.
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Android Launchers Are A Small Market, Can Facebook Home Change That?
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
Facebook is getting into the “Android launcher” market, the company has confirmed, thanks to its new Facebook Home application . The app, as , is new software that integrates the Facebook experience deeply into the Android operating system. But Android launchers today aren’t a very large market, relative to the reach Facebook has in mind. Will the Facebook brand be able to change that? Facebook already has an incredible presence on mobile. It’s the . And of Facebook’s more than 1 billion active users, 680 million are active on mobile. It only makes sense for Facebook to build something that takes better advantage of this major shift in computing by putting its service front and center in people’s everyday lives. But compared with the enormity of Facebook, the Android launcher market is much smaller. According to Google Play data, Go Launcher EX, the top free Android launcher, has somewhere between 50 million to 100 million installs worldwide. But that includes users who are installing it on multiple devices, or again and again as they change phones. According to app-store analytics firm Distimo*, the launcher has actually only been installed on 6 million unique devices in the U.S. since mid-August 2012. Launchers are mobile applications popular among Android users that allow you to further customize the look, feel and functionality of the native Android experience, replacing the user interface experience that ships with your phone. They allow you to do things like install themes, customize icon skins, change the way you navigate between screens or access the application drawer, for example, and much more. Some have 3D effects, others include their own widgets, and some offer a variety of widgets, themes and other add-ons for download or sale separately. But the one thing they have had in common is that they’ve generally appealed to a more advanced, more technically inclined crowd that likes to tweak and customize their devices. They appeal to those who feel confined by the locked-down experience on iOS and want more control. This is the competitive market that Facebook Home is joining, and Facebook’s Launcher, though beautifully designed, is an entirely different experience from the launchers available today. Although like the others, Home is about changing the default Android interface, it differs in that it changes it to one of Facebook’s liking, while other launchers are about offering users tools to make their phones their own. Today, Facebook Home’s launcher competitors include dozens of apps, including Go Launcher EX, ADW.Launcher, Nova Launcher, Apex Launcher, Launcher Pro, Regina 3D Launcher, Zeam Launcher, Holo Launcher, MXHome Launcher, Launcher 7, Launcher 8 SPB Shell 3D, Trebuchet Launcher, and many more. You might now be wondering how popular these types of programs are among users, especially here in Facebook’s market, the U.S. Of those listed above, the most . The only others ranked in the top 1,000 free applications on Android are the Nova Launcher (No. 324) and the Apex Launcher (No. 505). In the chart below, you can see the estimated installs per device for these launchers for March 2013. To be clear, this is not unique downloads per user, but installs per unique device. It’s not an exact science here, but this helps give you a feel for the size of the market in the U.S. for these types of customizations. The Go Launcher EX has an estimated 786,948 app installs in the U.S. Android app store in March 2013, and, as noted above, it has 6 million installs since August 2012. Among paid apps, Nova Launcher Prime is tops, ranked No. 6, which shows that a good many Android users care enough about customization to actually pay to achieve such a thing. However, because it’s a paid application, the number of installs here is even lower – around 138,794 in March. Other popular launchers in the top 1,000 paid Android apps are ranked even lower still, and have fewer installs. These include: Apex Launcher Pro (No. 32), ADWLauncher EX (No. 54), SPB Shell 3D (No. 147), Holo Launcher Plus (No. 299) and Launcher 7 – Donate (No. 974). By revenue, these apps also fall further down the charts: Nova Launcher Prime (No. 195), GO Launcher EX (No. 264), SPB Shell 3D (No. 339), Apex Launcher Pro (No. 513) and ADWLauncher EX (No. 584) are those that make a showing here. This indicates that only some portion of the audience is happy to pay for the extended features outside of the initial one-time download. That also speaks to Facebook’s ability to sell add-ons within its own “Facebook Home” experience. Other messaging apps ( ) often sell things like sticker packs/emoji, games, and other upgrades to generate revenue. Facebook doesn’t do this, nor does it display ads within the private messaging interfaces of either Facebook Messenger or its iOS-only private messaging app Poke. And from the experience described today, Facebook Home doesn’t include ads, either (at least, not yet). But it could take advantage of its deep presence on users’ devices to . “It is a bit difficult to say something about the market size for launchers,” admits Hendrik Koekkoek, a data analyst at Distimo. “The three apps in the top 1,000 free together generate 0.38% of all device installs of the top 1,000, so this is not particularly large,” he says. “For paid apps, the six apps in the top 1,000 together generate 2.9 percent of all device installs in the top 1,000. So proportionately, they generate quite a lot of all paid device installs,” Koekkoek adds. In terms of revenue, launchers don’t do all that well; the five apps in the top grossing generate only 0.22 percent of all revenue of the top 1,000. Facebook specifically chose not to do its own phone because an install base of 10 million to 20 million units was too small. “Our community has more than a billion people in it. We want to build the best experience for every person on every phone,” said Zuckerberg. But even extrapolating the above U.S. numbers out to a worldwide audience, it seems that being a consumer-facing app will take Facebook Home only so far. The company will need to that are bringing the next billion mobile users online to have a real impact here. Then again, maybe it’s wrong to look at the current launchers on the market and draw any conclusions about the potential for Facebook Home whatsoever. It’s a very different experience. Still, as a consumer app, Facebook will have to convince the Android customizers and tweakers that its app is better than their current overlay, and it will have to educate the more mainstream users that such customizations even exist.
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Myntra Buys Fitiquette, A Disrupt Finalist With A Virtual Fitting Room, As India’s Online Fashion Market Heats Up
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
, a developer of virtual fitting room technology and a , has been acquired by , one of the big fashion and lifestyle e-commerce companies in India. Myntra plans to put San-Francisco-based Fitiquette, led by CEO/co-founder Andy Pandharikar, at the center of a new innovation lab in the city, which also will be led by Pandharikar. It will also use Fitiquette’s core product on its retail site to drive more fashion purchases online. For now, that retail site is only in India, where Myntra reportedly made some $100 million in revenue last year. This is Myntra’s second recent acquisition in the U.S. The first, in November 2012, was of , which powers the private label vertical, Sher Singh. In both cases, the financial terms were not disclosed. Fitiquette is in a crowded space — or fitting room, as it were. Others coming at the idea of virtual fitting include , , , for undergarments, and . But with the fashion industry still in its early stages of moving to the web — even in the early-moving U.S. only about 10% of its $300 billion fashion market is online — there is a growing need for technology that helps consumers make accurate virtual estimates of how something will look in real life. One of the big gating factors to growth, Pandharikar says, is “lack of personalization.” From my experience, Fitiquette’s approach is pretty engaging. You start with a mannequin that you customize to your measurements across specific areas like height, hips, breasts and and so on, allowing for minute adjustments for closest accuracy; this is then used to suggest clothing sizes and looks that would fit your shape. When you try the clothes on, you can view the results in an animated, 3D simulation. Future plans had included even more precise ways of getting a more lifelike appearance by way of photographs and video, and the ability to mix and match more clothing together. The product had still been in pilot mode when it was purchased by Myntra, but it had already gained some traction: a limited beta of attracted some 20,000 users and somewhere between 2 million and 3 million try-ons, according to Pandharikar. And it had already been in discussions with a number of e-commerce players, some well-known, about rolling it out commercially. He says that Myntra approached Fitiquette almost immediately after TC Disrupt, and while Myntra had some customers nearly closed, “it was a deal we couldn’t resist.” That’s a great exit story for a startup borne out of a fictional product used in a Cisco commercial for virtualization — Pandharikar and his co-founder Anant Kumar met while working at Cisco, and were inspired, when the commercial about the “future of shopping” , to figure out a way of making a cool virtual fitting room into a reality. (There is more backstory here: Pandharikar also had some exposure to the fashion industry while still an undergraduate in India, when he imported and sold leather accessories to finance his way through college.) Although Fitiquette had been envisioning its technology as a white-label service, it doesn’t look like it will be developing any third-party deals with other e-commerce sites for now. Myntra says it’s seeing 100% growth every six months, with some 30,000 products from 500 brands online, but the acquisition will give it one more way to help remain competitive against the likes of Snapdeal (which ) and Flipkart. “Myntra aims to create the most compelling fashion shopping experience for Indian consumers at par or better than global standards,” Mukesh Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Myntra, said in a statement. “Fitiquette has developed pioneering technology for solving the Fit/Size problem online. This acquisition will not only help us improve the experience significantly but will also enhance our technology team with addition of top tech talent.” For its part, Myntra has raised about $70 million from VCs including Tiger Global, NEA-IndoUS Venture Partners, IDG and Accel Partners. And here is the video from when Fitiquette presented at TC Disrupt. Congrats, guys!
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Venmo Touch Will Help Chicago’s Braintree Bump Mobile Transactions Past $2 Billion A Year
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
, a payments gateway that’s backed by Accel Partners and NEA, sounds like it has effectively doubled the volume of mobile transactions it sees per year to $2 billion. It now touts 40 million credit card accounts in its vault. How does that compare to competitors? eBay, which operates Paypal, and that it expects to generate about $20 billion of mobile commerce and payments volume. So while Braintree is still smaller, it’s one of the few notable upstart companies in the space. Y Combinator’s Stripe is the other one with its formidable concentration of technical talent. , a New York-based mobile payments startup that made it easy and frictionless to transfer cash back and forth via texts and e-mail. The company kept Venmo’s brand name when it launched a , which makes it easy for consumer to store their payments information across a network of Braintree-supported apps like HotelTonight, Airbnb and Uber. The idea is to reduce friction in entering credit card information, so that customers won’t abandon potential purchases. Instead of having to re-enter your credit card information whenever you sign up for a new mobile service that’s Braintree-supported, Venmo Touch will automatically remember your payments data with one-click. Venmo Touch has been in beta, but now it’s fully launched and available for all Braintree merchants. On top of that, they’re releasing a new iOS SDK, which will make it easier for developers to create a native checkout flow with stock UI images and suggestions for text. It has a payment form, that already contains plenty of credit card entry user interface elements, and other features that help catch typos. They’ll bring both Venmo Touch and an improved SDK to Android in the near future. Braintree
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After Ditching The Groupon Model, Zozi Lands $10M To Build Out Its Marketplace For Celebrity-Guided Adventures
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
launched to become the go-to destination for those looking for an (affordable) excuse to take break from the daily grind by offering daily deals on a wide range of local adventures — everything from cocktail classes in Atlanta to kayaking in San Francisco Bay. However, after fighting it out in the crowded daily deals space for two years, Zozi shifted its focus to offering high-end, exclusive adventures and get-aways. Instead of offering deep discounts and being the middle man for activities and multi-day tours, the platform began offering once-in-a-lifetime experiences that are hosted by experts and celebrities. With the launch , Zozi allows users to not only go on a kayaking adventure, but paddle down the river with a world-record holder — or ski in Tahoe with Jonny Moseley. Although these kind of elite experiences (and celebrities) are tougher to supply and by moving away from daily deals it loses some of its appeal to the Average Joe, investors seem to be buying into Zozi’s new approach, likely because there’s more money to be made in celebrity-backed tours. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $10 million in growth capital and debt as part of a Series B1 round. Investors include Launch Capital, 500 Startups, Forerunner Ventures, Par Capital Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, Dolby Labs Chairman Dave Dolby and Seamless Founder Jason Finger, among others. The additional capital brings the company’s total financing to $17.5 million. Zozi is currently available in more than 20 cities across the U.S. and Canada, providing trips to a host of international destinations, while offering customers the chance to buy products from outdoor brands like Timbuk2 and Marmot, for example. The startup now employs a staff of 40+, with teams dedicated to curating its elite experiences, which now include activities like backcountry snowboarding with Travis Rice (a three-time X-Games Gold Medalist), gourmet cooking lessons with Michael Mina, vineyard bike tours and hardcore training with Ironman champion Chris Lieto. Going forward, Zozi wants to expand its roster of celebrity experts and increase its options across local experiences and gear. It was also look to improve its technology around booking and customer relations, while expanding deeper into eCommerce. Zozi co-founder and CEO TJ Sassani said that the key to the startup’s success, especially given increasing competition from other venture-backed adventure startups like Peek, is to give its customers “a trusted source to help them with discovery and curation of the most authentic experiences and the latest gear, while giving merchants an on-brand channel to connect with targeted new customers, who will become repeat buyers and refer their friends.” Whatever the case, high-margin, high-value experiences seem to be working for Zozi, but until it offers full-contact, backcountry blogging lessons with select TechCrunch writers, there’s still a long way to go. Find Zozi .
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Second Life Founder Raises $2.4M For New Stealth Startup, High Fidelity
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
a new startup from Second Life founder has raised $2.4 million out of a $3.4 million round, according to a new Listed in the filing are Rosedale, Freddy Heiberger, and Ryan Karpf (Heiberger and Karpf and ex- Linden Lab staffers, and co-founders of Rosedale’s last startup Coffee and Power). There aren’t too many details of what High Fidelity does, but according to the site, the company is working on developing “big ideas.” Some examples of this are: “What will the information spaces of the future look like? 20 years ago the web didn’t exist. What’s next? How will address schemas and navigational metaphors evolve to keep pace with computing power?” In a job posting on the site, High Fidelity writes that the startup is “prototyping the technology and user experience of a next-generation virtual reality system. It is an expansive vision with a number of moving parts that are each unique and compelling new technology.” With the company’s experience developing for Second Life, we’re curious to see what a next-generation virtual reality system looks like. Rosedale previously in 2011 as an online marketplace where people can buy and sell small jobs. The marketplace included its own virtual currency and payment system, live communications and public chat, a game-like rating and review system, and a real-world facility where users can meet and work together. It also opened up a co-working space in San Francisco where users could meet in a safe public area to work together and conduct transactions and services. The startup raised $1 million in funding from Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, Greylock Partners, Mitch Kapor, Catamount Ventures and Kevin Rose. It’s unclear what the future is for Coffee and Power. The startup its co-working space in San Francisco last October and the actual site seems to be But the company’s mobile app is still alive. One thing is for sure, anything Rosedale and the former Second Life team puts its hands on should be interesting (especially if the startup is working on some of the bold initiatives outlined on the High Fidelity homepage). We reached out to Rosedale for comment and will update if and when we hear back.
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Facebook Isn’t Forking Android, They’re Spooning With It
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
Facebook is , , not working on a phone. The first rule of tech news : when a company says they’re doing something, it’s as sure a sign as you can get that they will eventually do . “Today we’re finally gonna talk about that Facebook Phone…,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said only slightly in jest to kick off today’s event. He then went on to give the same type of semantics argument he’s been giving for years. “So we’re not building a phone. And we’re not building an operating system.” Both are technically true statements. And yet. Boom. Facebook Phone. Here’s the thing: you can argue semantics about basically anything in the world. Does Apple actually build the iPhone? Or does Foxconn? Does Amazon build their own OS? Or does Google? Is the phone I held in my hand today real? Or are we in The Matrix? the . And here it is. Far more interesting to me now is what exactly it means for the ecosystem in general. “You don’t need to fork Android to do this,” Zuckerberg said at the beginning of his keynote. This is a theme that would come up again and again throughout the presentation. At one point, there was even a cute blue and white fork icon that was crossed out. You simply must understand: Facebook is not forking Android! But why does that matter? It doesn’t. There’s this negative connotation around the term “forking,” perhaps because a few others, notably Amazon, have forked Android in a way Google probably would not prefer. But the forking argument is another semantics one. No, Facebook isn’t technically forking Android, but what they’re doing is arguably more invasive. As earlier, they’re essentially “spooning” it. And make no mistake, Facebook is the big spoon here. Sure, Facebook is saying all the right things now. How many times today did we hear about how great it is that Android is so “open”? And yes, Google did have to approve this new HTC First (Facebook Phone) device in order for it to be certified to carry the Google Apps and Play Store. But my sense is still that this tone may change in the coming months as Google and Facebook find themselves more at odds. We’ll see. As Zuckerberg himself said today, “The home screen is really the soul of your phone.” Why would Google not want to own that soul? Especially on an OS they built? They may be fine with Facebook Home for now, but the countdown to Google+ Home or, more interestingly, Google Now Home, is officially on. And when that hits… Facebook tried to convey something that wasn’t technically true during the keynote today. They tried to make us believe that Facebook Home is just another app. Or perhaps more accurately, a better kind of app. That is technically true of the version that will be in the Google Play store next week. But the version that will come pre-installed on the HTC First is . That version uses hooks in Android that are not normally exposed to standard apps. This is to allow Facebook Home to show all third-party app notifications, not just the ones coming from Facebook’s app. The downloadable Google Play version of Facebook Home will not be able to do this. HTC, using their previous experience from their “Sense” skins, did this for Facebook, as I understand it. And that’s why Google had to approve it beforehand. (Which, again, they did.) Now, maybe Google opens up these hooks in a future version of Android and this difference is moot. Or maybe they don’t. You have to wonder why they haven’t yet, especially with so many other “skins” out there in the Android world. Today, though, the difference remains. And so, while not forking Android, Facebook isn’t exactly just building your standard app, either. And if the technical argument isn’t enough to convince you, just think about how many other app makers partner with OEMs. And how many get key space inside the retail stores of a carrier partner? This Facebook Phone is a bigger deal than Facebook wants to let on. And understandably so. You don’t announce you’re going to rob someone’s house before you rob it. And just because, in the case of Android, Google left the doors unlocked, it doesn’t mean it’s not a robbery. (The situation becomes much more gray when you consider that, technically, Google invited them in by way of a third-party guest. But that would still be robbery. Even if they helped move around some furniture before they left with the goods. But now I’m way too deep in the woods…) If Facebook Home isn’t any good, none of this will likely matter. I only got to play around with it for a few minutes today, but I was generally impressed by how smooth everything seemed to operate. It seems almost un-Android-like in that regard. But giving good demo is not the same as being a good product. So we’ll have to wait and see on that front, as well. Still, I think today’s maneuver was a very smart one by Facebook. They’re not forking Android because that implies something bad. They’re spooning with Android, which is fine — nice, even. Never mind the fact that Google probably won’t be too fond of either eventually for the same underlying reasons. These days, Samsung doesn’t seem to mention Android too often even though they’re so reliant on the OS. But Google seems okay with that as the Search and Play revenues continue to flow in. Similarly, Facebook didn’t mention the Android-maker too often today, and I doubt they will going forward with this and future Facebook Phones. And Google should be okay with that as long as the Search and Play revenues continue to flow in. But what if Facebook Home eventually swaps out Google Search for the search engine of their investor and close partner, Microsoft? Or what if they put Facebook Search front and center instead? Or what if in general because they just use this device for Facebook services and little else? Or what if Facebook decides to use their own app store instead of Google Play? Or what if Google, sick of seeing Samsung, Amazon, and now Facebook fondle Android, decides that they want to own the branding of their creation? Again, what if they want to be the “soul of your phone”? There are a lot of variables here going forward. “It is possible that they go back on their commitment to openness. But I don’t think they will. And it would take a lot of effort,” Zuckerberg said when asked about Google today. That reeks of one of those statements that will come back to haunt. Or maybe he’s just being disingenuous, feigning naiveness — because, again, maybe he’s the thief to Google’s joker. For now, Facebook and Google are strange bedfellows, spooning.
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Google Launches Drive App Data Folders, Lets Developers Safely Store Configuration Files And Other Data
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
If you’re a developer building web or mobile apps that use Google Drive for storing information, you’ve probably found that users really can’t be trusted not to delete or move that data. Once the user does that, the app experience won’t be so great and the data that the app needs to run isn’t there to use. Today, Google has which are protected and can’t be seen by users within their Drive account. Other apps can’t see the files either, so there is now an added layer of security to fight off bad actors who build apps to swipe information or do other damage. The Google Drive team suggests that these app data folders are used for configuration files, app state data or files that shouldn’t be modified in any way. Even though users can’t see the data, they can see how much space it is taking up on their devices and clear the data at any time. Here’s what you’ll see as a user in your manage apps panel: Additionally, “custom properties” can be added to Drive files that will allow developers to create searchable fields that are either app-specific or are to be shared with other apps. More information about the , a site oddly not owned or operated by Google. [Photo credit: ]
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Google Says Facebook Home Demonstrates Android’s Openness, Framing Apple As Restrictive
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
Google’s statement on Facebook’s was short and sweet, but very telling, so let’s dissect it a little bit. As we noted earlier, Facebook because of its flexibility. Basically it’s easy to customize. Other platforms, not so much. Zuckerberg even mentioned that Windows Phone might be a bit easier to work with, calling it out as “somewhere in the middle” of Android and iOS. Here’s what Google said to us a little while ago: The Android platform has spurred the development of hundreds of different types of devices. This latest device demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular. You’ll notice that the first thing that the company says is that there are “hundreds” of different types of devices running its mobile operating system. In the past, that’s been seen as a bad thing, . Here, Google is clearly positioning this as an advantage, that is has more choices for consumers than say, Apple has. Secondly, “this latest device,” being the , which is pre-installed with Facebook Home, demonstrates flexibility. There’s that word again. Clearly, Google is firing a rocket at its competitor Apple, which is notoriously very stiff when it comes to customization. In Apple’s mind, its users don’t know what they want to see until it shows it to them. By letting a company like Facebook take over the first experience users have when they wake up their phone, they are giving away pretty much everything. Again, Google points this out as a competitive advantage. In an , Google made sure to pump up its own products at the same time: And it’s a win for users who want a customized Facebook experience from Google Play — the heart of the Android ecosystem — along with their favorite Google services like Gmail, Search, and Google Maps. In this added bit, Google makes sure to bring the attention back to its baked-in Android services, like search, email and maps. Is that Google getting a little bit jealous of all of the fuss over Facebook? Not at all. These companies are competitive in the sense that they’re both after eyeballs, but when it comes to social interactions, they couldn’t be more different. Forget the Google+ argument here; it wasn’t built to be a competitor to Facebook. Google owns search and email for a reason, they’re better products than what others offer. Both Facebook and Google are the winners here. Facebook doesn’t have to build its own phone or operating system, and Google gets to keep pointing out the fact that customization is something that consumers want, and Apple doesn’t deliver on. The two companies are using each other, and as MG Siegler pointed out, . Yes, Facebook has partnered with Apple to bring users a way to update a status message quicker, but it’s clear after seeing Facebook Home today, that it’s simply not enough interaction for the social network. For those who spend a good bit of time using Facebook on their mobile device, they will soon tire of having to wake up their phone, find the Facebook app, open it and read their notifications. Once they see a friend or colleague with the HTC First or another Android device with Facebook Home installed, they will wonder why they can’t do the same thing on their iPhone. Other companies like Facebook are going to start getting interested in this approach as well, as far as introducing customized launchers for their user base. Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp was at the Home event today, don’t you think he might go back to New York City and talk to his team about what a Tumblr-themed version of Android would look and act like? Of course he is. What about Dropbox’s Drew Houston, who was also at the event? Could filesharing become a driving force of your mobile experience? It depends on what type of user you are. Don’t get me wrong, Apple isn’t in the corner crying right now, but some folks at the company have to be looking at today’s news and starting to think of ways to win back developers who want to follow Facebook’s lead and might start focusing on Android first. Facebook Home has finally made the Android/Open vs. iOS/Closed a mainstream issue. [Photo credit: ]
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Facebook Home Boots Google Search Off The Homescreen On Most Android Phones
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
Shortly after this morning’s Facebook Home announcement, I had the opportunity to chat with Tom Allison, Facebook’s Engineering Manager for Android. We discussed his favorite parts of Home, how much they had to change the underlying OS (read: not much), and the biggest challenges they faced during Home’s development. One thing I found particularly interesting: while the version of Facebook Home that ships with the just-announced HTC First will have Google search built in, the version they’ve built for everyone else to download will not. On the handsets that don’t come with this pre-installed, you’ll need to pop into Chrome, open up a dedicated search app, or drop down into your old homescreen (which is surprisingly easy — check out the video of it below.) Why does that matter? Remember: search (or, more accurately, advertisements on search results) is a pretty massive part of Google’s business model. Having search on the homescreen makes searching an impulse, thus increasing the volume of searches dramatically. If Facebook manages to get this thing on as many devices as they clearly hope to, it could put a bit of a dent in whatever money Google is pulling in from their Android efforts by way of search. Speaking of homescreens: if you’re looking to install Facebook Home but don’t want to lose access to your phone’s original homescreen (be it Samsung’s TouchWiz, HTC’s Sense, or the stock Android homescreen) and the widgets that come with, don’t fret. We spotted Home running on a Galaxy Note 2 earlier, and managed to get a quick demo of how the two homescreens can co-exist. You don’t have to flip through settings, toggle anything on or off, or reset your phone — just tap the “More…” button tucked away into the app drawer, and you’re there. When you’re done, the device’s home key takes you right back into Facebook Home. (Pardon the sketchy audio here — we were in a crowded room, and my iPhone apparently got scared and covered its ears)
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 3 | null |
The Inspiring Tenacity Of Roger Ebert’s Last Words
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
[tweet https://twitter.com/ebertchicago/status/319316948045422593] Only a day before legendary film critic Roger Ebert passed away, he tweeted a final farewell at the , promising to pioneer new digital projects, in addition to a hefty schedule of movie reviews. At the ripe age of 70 and the cheery survivor of salivary cancer that left him him without a jaw or voice, Ebert proved that neither age nor disease could stand in the way of a pioneering mind. After cancer stole Ebert’s powers of speech, he turned to Twitter, becoming an instant sensation. “But there’s something seductive about it: The stream, the flow, the chatter, the sudden bursts of news, the snark, the gossip, time itself tweet-tweet-tweeting away,” for the Times. As of less than a month ago, his movie whit was still sharp as ever. [tweet https://twitter.com/ebertchicago/status/317795555617144832] He even braved the stage at TED, giving a speech entirely read by Apple’s monotone voice app, and the help of his close confidants. “People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems,” he said. ” I’ve got to say, in first grade, they said I talked too much, and now I still can.”
His optimism for technology is worth quoting at length: All of this has happened in the blink of an eye. It is unimaginable what will happen next. It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history. Indeed, I am lucky to live in history at all, because without intelligence and memory there is no history. For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice. Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness. And because of it, I can communicate as well as I ever could. We are born into a box of time and space. We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others. For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence. I cannot speak; I can only type so fast. Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated, but with my computer, I can communicate more widelythan ever before. I feel as if my blog, my email, Twitter and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation. They aren’t an improvement, but they’re the best I can do. They give me a way to speak. Not everybody has the patience of my wife, Chaz. But online, everybody speaks at the same speed. Ebert received an immediate outpouring of support from every imaginable outlet and personality, with links to past gems [tweet https://twitter.com/SethGreen/status/319899749367042048] [tweet https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/319908591857442818] [tweet https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/319904923598848002] Ebert was brilliant and inspiring to his last days. A lesson for us all. His last words, written for the Times: “So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies”
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Film Critic Roger Ebert Dead At 70
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
In the annals of criticism it is often the case that a writer is cursed in life and forgotten in death. For Roger Ebert, voluminous historian of the cinema and its most astute critic, neither of these was the case. Ebert, along with his counterpoint, Gene Siskel, defined the modern movie review and brought the figurative down from their lofty perch and into our living rooms. He was affable, honest, and as a longtime columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, so prolific – 306 reviews in the last year alone and over 200 a year prior to that – as to make many journalists look like withering failures. His kindness and blunt judgements made his writing a treat and I can only imagine how it felt to be the recipient of his attention. A person’s work is their child and he was a strong scold and virtuous champion. Ebert, who suffered from thyroid and salivary gland cancer, died today at age 70. He recently announced a after finding that his cancer had returned. He is survived by his wife, Chaz Hammel-Smith Ebert.
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Facebook’s Gokul Rajaram, Google’s Neal Mohan, And Twitter’s Kevin Weil Will Discuss The Ad Landscape At Disrupt NY
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be discussing the latest trends in digital advertising with representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter at the end of April during TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. My goal for the panel is to give attendees from both Madison Avenue and the startup world an overview of the latest products and opportunities from the major online ad platforms. We’ll talk about successful campaigns, best practices, and long-term strategy, and I’ll do my best to pry out concrete details about future plans. One of the panelists is , senior director of revenue products at Twitter. Weil leads product development and strategy for Twitter’s ad platform. He was previously the product manager for Twitter’s advertising-facing data products and the tech lead for Twitter analytics. We’ll also have , Google’s vice president of display advertising products. Mohan joined Google through the DoubleClick acquisition in 2008, and he’s now in charge of display ad products on both desktop and mobile, including the Google Display Network, AdSense, AdMob, Ad Exchange, InviteMedia, AdMeld and the DoubleClick suite. Our final panelist is , product director for ads at Facebook. Rajaram leads the roadmap and execution for Facebook’s ad products. He also has experience at Google, where he helped launch AdSense and was product lead on the DoubleClick acquisition. Disrupt NY starts on April 27 with our . The conference officially kicks off at the Manhattan Center on April 29 with a schedule filled with speakers, product demos, and the Startup Battlefield, where 30 startups compete for the Disrupt Cup and a giant $50,000 check. Early-bird, general-admission tickets are available until April 11. Or for a chance for the same ticket for free.
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SFO Serves Cease-And-Desist Letters To Keep Ride-Sharing Companies From Operating At The Airport
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
Last week, InstantCab announced to the world that it had , asking it to stop picking up and dropping off passengers there. Well, apparently it wasn’t alone, as other new transportation startups had also received the same notice last month. SideCar, for instance, confirmed that it received a cease-and-desist letter in early March. Zimride’s Lyft hasn’t responded to our inquiries, but we’ve heard that it too was one of the companies hit with a C&D notice. InstantCab, which operates a hybrid service with both community and taxi drivers, was actually the last of the companies to be served with a notice by SFO. And that notice applied to its community drivers only, not the taxi e-hail side of its business. The letters served to remind companies like Lyft and SideCar that the site is operated by the City and County of San Francisco and the Airport Commission, and also as a reminder that they didn’t have permits to operate on SFO premises. Without a permit, the notices say that continued operation of community driver services at SFO will be considered “an unlawful trespass.” In particular, the notice says those services are violating a couple of airport rules and regulations, including this one: Rule 3.3(E): No person shall enter or remain on Airport property and buy, sell, peddle or offer for sale or purchase any goods, merchandise, property or services of any kind whatsoever, on or from Airport property, without the express written consent of the Director or the Director’s duly authorized representative. Like every other airport in the world, SFO allows regulated taxi services to pick up and drop off passengers on the premises. Black car and limo services have been driving passengers to and from SFO for decades. And over the past few years, Uber has even provided a transportation alternative to those flying in and out of the airport — although Uber drivers are mostly indistinguishable from limo services, in part because the company partners with them for its UberBLACK and UberSUV service. The key distinguishing feature of the services hit by cease-and-desist letters by SFO seems to be that they employ community drivers who are not licensed by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency or the California Public Utilities Commission. In that respect, SFO isn’t the first to try to outlaw these services. Lyft and SideCar (along with Uber and Tickengo) had all last year before the agency backtracked and began examining the possibility of . And SideCar has received some pushback from local regulators in markets, such as Philadelphia and Austin, cities it recently expanded into. The wild card here is Uber, which to our knowledge hasn’t yet received notice from SFO. While it’s quietly served the airport’s passengers since launching in San Francisco years ago, it recently joined the ride-sharing brigade by contracting community drivers for its lower-priced UBERx service. Photo Credit: via
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Indiegogo Suffers DDOS Aimed At YourAnonymousNews Campaign
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 |
When there is no central authority, who has the authority to sell t-shirts? That question came to a head over the past few days when announced it planned to for Anonymous news. The project, called YAN, is described thus: A noble cause, to be sure. The result, however, is that Indiegogo was hit by a DDOS attack of unclear origin. had few details to share, but it’s interesting to see how quickly, we assume, Anonymous pulled a solid Ouroboros and began to eat itself. Indiegogo founder Slava Rubin apologized for the outage and wrote: “Any campaigns scheduled to conclude this week will have the option of extending until Sunday by contacting our 24×7 Customer Happiness team.” YAN’s mission here is a little odd – they want to break us free from mainstream media through video and reporting, etc. and they think they only need $2,000 to do so – and their perks, including T-shirts and mugs, seem to be a bit more like the things you’d get from the local public radio station than a nefarious organization purporting to shake the crown of power, but them’s the breaks. As of right now Indiegogo seems to be working fine but the team there is working hard to bolster the servers against future attacks.
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Nokia’s Verizon-Bound Lumia 928 Spotted In Leaked Images Ahead Of Launch
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
It’s been a long time coming, but Verizon Wireless customers should soon have another high-end Windows Phone 8 device to lust after. After the handset was spotted both in both the FCC’s and Verizon’s systems, noted leaker has come through yet again with a new image of the upcoming Nokia Lumia 928 (formerly known as the “Laser”). There’s not a whole lot to be gleaned from the image save for the fact that the device seems to have done away with the rounded sides and flat top and bottom edges of its immediate predecessor the Lumia 920. As it turns out, one of the neatest potential features noted in is nowhere to be found here — according to , the Lumia 928 will sport a more traditional polycarbonate body instead of the aluminum chassis that was originally slated for the device way back when. Most of the 928’s internals (think the 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage) are expected to remain the same as its cousin the 920, but Nokia may run with an OLED panel this time around rather than the IPS LCD as seen in the 920. In short, it’s hard not to think of the Lumia 928 as what the Lumia 920 should’ve been when it launched. According to recent figures from , Windows Phone has managed to pull away from BlackBerry in terms of mobile OS market share, and devices like the 928 should help Microsoft’s mobile efforts pick up a little more steam in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, Nokia has been working to make its Windows Phones the most feature-rich out there with exclusivity agreements with companies like , so it’s clear that some developers are starting to see the benefits of embracing the prospect of developing for the Windows Phone platform. That said, WP’s third place position isn’t completely safe at this point — BlackBerry posted some and if recent leaks are to be believed, a low-cost BlackBerry 10 device with a QWERTY keyboard could see the light very soon. Z10 shipments point to reasonably healthy demand, and an affordable device launched in key markets could be just what the doctor ordered for BlackBerry.
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Google Fiber’s Next Stop Could Be Austin, Texas
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
Back in early 2011, Austin, Texas lost to Kansas City, Kansas for the distinction of being the first city in the United States to get wired up with Google’s high-speed Fiber internet service despite to catch the search giant’s eye. While the average tech-savvy Austinite has probably forgotten that campaign, it looks like Google didn’t — local ABC affiliate reported earlier this evening that Google will indeed announce its Austin Fiber rollout early next week citing multiple sources from within the city’s government. But let’s back up a minute first. Earlier today, Google and representatives of the City of Austin sent out invitations to a secretive announcement about something that would have a “positive impact on Austinites and the future of the city.” Incredibly vague, right? The fuzzy wording of the invitation left the door open for many interpretations, but a potential Fiber rollout seemed like the most likely suspect. After taking a gander at the invitation and conferring with their own sources, reported that there was a strong possibility that Google and representatives of the Austin government would announce just such an endeavor next Tuesday morning, and now KVUE’s reports seem to have sealed the deal. While the news seems to have slipped out ahead of schedule, there’s still no word on any of the specifics of the plan and Google is assuredly aiming to keep quiet on the matter for the next few days. Still, Google will have plenty of tech-savvy neighbors to keep it company as it begins its work in Texas’ capital city — Apple operates a sizable campus there that’s in the coming months, Dell has been camped out there for years, and Samsung churns out plenty of chips out in its Austin fabrication plants. That’s just the tip of the tech iceberg out in those parts, and the move to bring Fiber to Austin should see Google take on a slightly more prominent position in the city before long. Google’s existing office is ensconced in a high-rise across the freeway from UT Austin’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus, but that won’t do for when it comes time to deal with its customers. Expect Google to secure some more consumer-friendly space to act as a showroom/customer service center for its first wave of Fiber subscribers, just as it did with its so-called Fiber Space in Kansas City’s Volker neighborhood. I’ve reached out to Google for comment on the matter, and will update this story if/when I hear back.
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On The Michael Arrington Accusations
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
We normally don’t cover criminal accusations against individuals without police reports or other documents filed, or significant evidence like But we’re making an exception. TechCrunch founder is facing accusations involving physical threats, assault and rape. Given his relationship with us this past year, and the culture of transparency that he helped create, we’re sharing where we are at with our reporting on the story. We take all of these allegations seriously. We are treating them like any other story of this magnitude, in that we have been working to understand the situation as thoroughly as we can before publishing about it. We have a little more to add at this point, while we are continuing to report the story. The original claim, by former girlfriend Jenn Allen, is that he physically abused her, then threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the episode. , and she followed up with additional comments there claiming that he had raped her as well as another woman. Rumors of similar alleged abuse have circulated in previous years amongst our peers. Many tech reporters have investigated them, but no stories had been published until those based on Allen’s posts this week. Some former friends of Arrington’s, including and have come forward this week to support her general claim, saying they have heard similar rumors. Another Arrington friend from that era, , is that he lived in the same house as Arrington when Allen was also staying there and knew of no abuse. Today, detailing an alleged assault by Arrington that took place at a company he worked at in 1999, . A colleague of Arrington’s, Cecile Sharp, is quoted in the article saying that he had assaulted another coworker. The article also quotes sources alleging that in 2009 he threw then-girlfriend, Meghan Asha, against a wall. Neither Allen nor Arrington have provided us with comments at this time. Regarding Allen’s claims, we are not yet able to determine if they are true or not. She has not filed any police complaint or lawsuit to our knowledge. Regarding the RealNames allegation, we have confirmed that there was an accusation, the conclusion of which did not result in a punishment for Arrington. We are still trying to understand the details of that from other people who were at the company at the time. So far we have this from RealNames founder and long-time Arrington friend : “Mike was indeed the subject of an accusation at RealNames. As is normal in these circumstances an outside party was hired to conduct an investigation. This was extensive and I was never directly involved in it as I was not a witness to any events. The investigation concluded that there was no behavior to answer for. Mike was never reprimanded in any way. Both parties asked for confidentiality and to date this has been honored.” Regarding the claim that Meghan Asha was thrown against a wall by Arrington in 2009, we have spoken to a number of secondary sources, some of whom claim that it happened and some who say it did not. Asha has not spoken publicly on the matter. [ : she has replied , saying that “None of the claims made on my behalf over the past week are accurate,” although she doesn’t say much more.] We have also spoken to two other women who Arrington had previously dated. One is who some rumors had indicated had suffered abuse from him while dating. She tells us this is absolutely not true. The other woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, also said that there was no abuse. In sum, there have been some claims and more rumors about Arrington, as well as counterclaims and most of all, lots of missing information. We are continuing our reporting to find definitive evidence. We hope that anyone who knows more facts as to what happened between him and the women he is accused of abusing will come forward publicly, or .
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I Kind Of Love These “Exit Traffic Ads” That Show Up When You Leave A Site
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
“Wow, that was a cool ad” is not something I say often. But I was recently browsing a Star Wars Wikia site, and when I clicked an external link it popped up a half-screen interstitial for 15 seconds before redirecting me to my destination. Instead of cluttering its site with more ads, Wookiepedia let me bounce around internally for free, but “charged” me to leave. And I was impressed. Advertising is the lifeblood of the consumer Internet. It finances content and utilities so they can be free and widely accessible. But too much advertising and the user experience degrades. No one wants to sift out value from a sea of marketing. Exit traffic ads seem like an elegant solution. They can take some ad strain off of a webpage and encourage more intra-site browsing. Depending on their implementation, they’re not that obstructive. On Wookiepedia, at least, you can click a “Skip this sd” button to go straight to your destination. Otherwise you can ‘x’ an ad out or click “Want to go back?” to return to the page you were browsing. You can try it yourself by going to and then clicking one of the “Official Friends” links at the bottom. Some people are going to hate these because they throw up barriers too open web browsing. I understand that. But I think they give businesses design freedom, so they can create a pure on-site experience by offloading the clutter. I want to see more of these exit traffic ads. I feel like they’re a smart alternative or complement to standard display media. They can be big and glossy, and the format ensures they’re noticed unlike most banners. It feels like a fair value exchange, too. A site points me towards something I want to check out, so I don’t feel so bad seeing one of their ads for a few seconds on the way out. I like them a hell of a lot more than the entry traffic interstitial ads that roadblock many content sites (*cough* other tech news blogs *cough*). It might even encourage sites to link externally more often. I can imagine exit traffic ads finding a place on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. These sites are obsessed with design and the onsite user experience, but are keen on new monetization strategies. This ad format could reward them for being content discovery engines, and make them more willing to open gates out of their walled gardens.
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The Obvious Corp. Takes Backseat As Ev Williams, Biz Stone, And Jason Goldman Shift Focus To Individual Startups
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
The , the startup and investment vehicle headed up by Twitter co-founders , , and former Twitter exec that has become an umbrella company of sorts to a number of buzzy startups including , , and , is shifting gears, according to a written today by Williams. What exactly is happening comes across as a bit vague — which is fitting, as Obvious’ mission was purposefully vague at , and over the years those involved have mostly preferred to let the corporation’s work and products speak for themselves. But the general gist is that as far as the focus of its founders, Obvious as an entity is taking a backseat to the individual startups it has produced and funded. Medium, the Obvious-incubated , is now operating as its own standalone company with Ev Williams spending “98 percent” of his time there. Some 30 staffers who previously were hired as Obvious employees are now working as full-time Medium employees. Meanwhile, as we’ve reported previously, Stone is working on a . Goldman, for his part, is spending the bulk of his time helping to lead Branch from New York City and currently looking for an additional company to work with. The more general collaborative relationship between Goldman, Stone, and Williams will continue to be called “Obvious,” the blog post says, but the entity as a corporation seems to be winding down, or at least scaling back. He explained how they will continue to work together and detailed Obvious’ affiliations like this: “…the collaboration between Biz, Jason, and myself — which we call ‘Obvious’ — continues… Besides Medium, Branch, and Jelly, we have working relationships with Lift (of which I’m on the board), Beyond Meat and GoodFit (of which Biz is on the board) and Neighborland. We also have a handful of less-active partnerships with entrepreneurs we were lucky enough to angel invest in, like Findery, LaunchPad Toys, and Faraday Bikes. (There are a couple more, which we’ll announce when the time is right.)” Via email today, Williams told TechCrunch that there are no hard feelings involved in the change — that it’s been a natural evolution over the past several months. In his blog post, he elaborated a bit on the reasons for the shift: “Turns out, we like focus. We rebooted Obvious in 2011 with a vague plan. We started investing, incubating, and experimenting to figure out what worked and what we wanted to do at this stage in our careers; we just knew we wanted to work together do stuff that mattered. Among other things, the first few months taught us that we gravitated toward diving in more deeply on a small number of things — rather than having a lighter touch on many ventures.” It’ll be exciting to see what the next chapter will bring for all involved here.
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Heroku Launches 2X Dynos With 1GB Of RAM For Increased Concurrency, More Memory-Intensive Applications
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
Cloud application platform is coming off a streak of bad news after it was accused of its customers about how some aspects of its service worked and potentially costing its users in the process. Today, Heroku is putting the spotlight back on features again, with the , which, in some ways, will also help alleviate the job-queuing issues that sparked the recent debate. The 2X dynos (dynos are basically the containers that run an ) will offer exactly what the name implies: twice the memory (1GB instead of 512MB) and also twice as many CPU shares as the basic dynos (now called 1X). During the beta phase, the 2X dynos will cost the same as $0.05 per hour as the 1X dynos. After that, they will cost, as their name implies, $0.10 per hour. Heroku is also exploring the option to launch even larger dynos (4X+) in the future. Heroku argues that these larger dynos will allow for on single-threaded Rails apps using the Unicorn HTTP server for Rack applications. Heroku also says that the larger dynos will work well for JVM languages that can take advantage of the vertical scale the 2X dynos provide. In addition, the company says, this should help with performing memory-intensive background jobs for image processing and geospatial processing.
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Facebook Offers Clarification On Home And Privacy Before Full Android Invasion
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
Just a day after announcing a new , the company has issued a . Though many seem excited to see Facebook take baby steps toward a full-fledged operating system, some are also concerned that using Facebook as a portal to your smartphone could become risky given all the information Facebook already collects on us. expressed serious concerns over Facebook knowing your location at any given time, namely because they’d eventually be able to pin-point the location of your home, place of business, etc. seemed concerned about the fact that Facebook would be reading text messages as well as Facebook messages. Combining the two, along with when and how often we launch other apps, could give Facebook an even more powerful position in the app ecosystem and as an advertising platform. If you find yourself expressing concerns over Facebook’s invasion of Android, here’s the important things you need to know: With regards to location, things get a bit tricky. As with any other app, you have complete control over location permission within Facebook Home settings, so you have every opportunity to turn off location data entirely. If you choose to leave location on, here’s what you’re working with. From the new : Facebook Home doesn’t use location in any way that’s different from the Facebook app you already have on your Android phone. You can learn about how location works across Facebook in our and Help Center. That essentially means that, anytime you Facebook (upload a picture, check in, post a status update, send a message) Facebook will be able to pin-point where that took place. However, a Facebook spokesperson that Facebook will not actively be tracking the smartphone’s GPS location. In other words, they aren’t pulling location data from us in any new ways, but they are putting Facebook in front of us more, and will likely be able to gather data in the exact same manner. Whether this sounds shocking to you or not, it’s the trajectory we’re headed down. Zoom out for a moment: how many companies function on an ad-based revenue? Lots. This works because advertising is necessary, albeit annoying at some times. Without it, how would you know when or that . If companies like Facebook can actually gather enough data to make ads meaningful and relevant, maybe we don’t have to hate those ads as much as we think we do. Obviously, that’s a story for another day, considering Zuck merely foreshadowed advertising within Home, never giving an actual timeline. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that Facebook feels it needs to educate users on this. The idea of Home is new — UI skins have been done on Android forever, but not by our single-most important online social tool. And it’s not like Facebook has never been used in the same sentence as “privacy issues,” whether you see that as innovative or terrifying. Facebook has always pushed for more data, and been pushed back by its users. It’s a tale as old as Facebook itself. But the social network has gone from being the web site we spend the most time on, to being the site we spend the most time on a little blue blip on our phones. Constant access. Then, Facebook teamed up with Apple and built itself right into the OS. Oh, and some more little blue blips popped up, like Messenger and Poke. Now, Facebook will not only be the first web site you see on your laptop, perhaps the first app you open on your phone each morning. It will be the first thing you see every time you wake up your Android smartphone. It’s a lot to take in. It’d be strange if you weren’t at least slightly concerned. Facebook knows this and thus, the explanation. How much you want to bet we see a similar explanation when Facebook announces its Google Glass app? Glass Home? Welcome to a new world.
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Ask A VC: MkII Ventures’ Ron Palmeri On The Rise Of Company Builders And More
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC series. We chatted about the rise of , or “studios,” in the technology and VC world. Palmeri was one of the first participants in this movement while he was a managing director at Minor Ventures (GrandCentral (now Google Voice), OpenDNS and Scout Labs (acquired by Lithium). And now Palmeri is continuing this with MkII Ventures. Palmeri founded Prism Skylabs with Steve Russell and is in the process of launching a new stealth startup, which Palmeri reveals in the video above. Tune in for more!
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Goodbye Ugly Forums! Moot Is A Flexible And Modern Platform For Online Discussion (And It’s Free)
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
, a startup offering a new take on commenting and forums, is launching today after three and a half years of development with the goal of bringing these key pieces of Internet discussion into the modern era. Unlike many of the options for online discussion that exist today, Moot is designed to be very flexible and customizable, according to a site owner’s needs, while also being clean, simple, realtime, embeddable and cross-platform. It even works on mobile devices like iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. The company was founded by Portland-based serial entrepreneur , along with creator and , both of Helsinki. The team had on popular web video player , which is what led them to the idea to create Moot in the first place. Explains Couch, “we were rebuilding Flowplayer’s site and restructuring everything. We had a separate support system and separate forums, and we wanted to have a completely static-generated site. And there wasn’t really anything available,” he says. “We could install a separate forum software, but all our options looked like they were from the 90s…there wasn’t any sort of unified system that would combine the content, combine the users from commenting and forums, and allow us the configurability to create our own options.” So they built one. And it’s called . The platform allows site owners to design their systems to function however they want. Maybe you only need commenting, or maybe you want commenting and forums, or maybe you want some comments to appear on the forums. Maybe you want flat commenting. Or threaded. And maybe you want users to be able to comment using the same username and password they’re already using on your service today. Moot allows for this kind of flexibility, but it adds a number of other useful features, too, while removing others that the founders feel are extraneous to their core purpose of enabling online discussions. For example, posting inline photos and videos is not supported out of the box, but because Moot is configurable, a site owner could add these back in if it were mission-critical for them to do so. Also not available are things like voting comments up or down, which Couch says can make following and replying to discussions confusing for users. If Tumblr was the simpler form of blogging to the more powerful but complex WordPress, then Moot may be seen as the simpler commenting and discussion platform to the others on the market today. Just getting the basic forum up-and-running takes under a minute, notes Couch. Then it’s only a matter of copy-and-pasting some embed code. While the most immediately noticeable thing about Moot is its clean and simple appearance, the at the other features that make the platform interesting. For example, forums can now offer a real-time feed of posts, and users can track their own interactions in a “My Feed” section, which is also realtime. Search is also fast and grammar-aware, correcting misspellings on the fly and finding related words (e.g. a search for “configuring Pyton” would return posts with the phrase “configure Python”). The rest of the discussion on the topic searched will appear collapsed, but can be expanded from the search interface. The discussions update in realtime here, too, and you can reply directly from the search results page with just a click. (See above.) Site comments can be flat or threaded, but only one level deep to keep threads easier to follow, says Couch. Comments can be liked by others, and Moot uses this metadata along with Akismet by WordPress and community voting to help it manage spam. Admins can manage and remove comments from an online dashboard, as expected, which is also designed with ease-of-use in mind. Users can be identified as being online or offline, which is indicated with a red or green button next to their usernames. Users get to create their own usernames, but they can’t change them after the fact. They also can’t edit or delete their comments after a brief grace period following their post. After 2.71 minutes (aka “ “), those comments become permanent unless an admin removes them. “The reason for that is that if you ever come into a thread where people edited or deleted a post, you can’t follow it anymore,” says Couch. “It becomes incomprehensible.” Moot’s core product, which competes to some extent with platforms like Discourse, Livefyre, Disqus, and others, is free. The plan is to eventually charge for three advanced features: SSO (single sign-on) support ($20/month), custom branding ($5/month), and support for private forums ($10/month). These add-ons are not yet live, however. In the meantime, interested site and forum owners can .
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Gillmor Gang Live 04.05.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
– John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor.
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Readability Launches Top Reads, An Online Magazine Aggregating The Platform’s Most-Read Content
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
Reading app once butted heads with Apple on , but more recently its friction points have been in competition with apps like , , , and , who all present consumers with ways of aggregating and making it easier to read the vast sea of content available online. Now Readability, which has 5 million monthly active users stripping out and reading tens of millions of articles each day, is launching , a reading aggregation service of its own based on the most-read stories on Readability, to get more people to spend more time on its platform. Top Reads will launch first as a responsive web app for desktop and mobile screens, and Rich Ziade, one of Readability’s founders, says that there will be dedicated native mobile apps on the way in a matter of months if the response is good. Top Reads is not exactly new. It first appeared in a more pared-down format in Readability’s mobile app ; Zaide says that has been getting strong traffic, with about two-thirds of the site’s 5 million users dipping into it every month. That was enough attention, he said, to get the company to explore making it into a standalone service with its own URL. “Discovery is a still big deal,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re getting swamped with stuff to read.” And while Readability has developed a dedicated audience of people using it to tag articles they are finding themselves, this will help them discover more by looking at what others are reading, too. The new, standalone Top Reads looks more like Flipboard than text river, with pictures and links through to either read later, share, or read instantly. Clicking through to read instantly takes you to the article’s web page, with a link at the top to read it in Readability’s stripped-down format: This is what that format then looks like: Ziade says that the pared-down version of Top Reads will remain in Readability’s mobile app, which today accounts for just under half of all of the company’s traffic. Over time, the two Top Reads will diverge even more: the in-app version will be a “best of” list, while the dedicated Top Reads site will display a much larger selection of content, with features like views of specific subject categories (eg sport, technology, arts and so on) coming soon. Readability is currently funded by arc90, an app design studio based in New York, but the plan is to become a viable, standalone business. Ziade says Readability makes a modest revenue from licensing its “parsing engine” to a few device makers and other apps, which use it to present content on their own sites. Some of these are confidential; one that isn’t is Reeder, one of the companies aspiring to the soon-to-be-vacated Google Reader throne. The idea is to use pick up more of these customers, luring them in not just with Readability’s existing platform, but added analytics along the lines of those that are being used to power Top Reads. Ziade says that just about every online publisher has had its content pass through Readability’s platform, so it becomes a huge repository of aggregated information about what is getting read. In that vein, getting more people reading and browsing through Top Reads will help further grow that dataset. “We are already getting a really good sense of what people are reading on the web,” Ziade says. “Top Reads is the first step of surfacing that value.” What’s interesting is that while services like Flipboard are “social” readers, with people using their social networks to share and discover content, Top Reads is a bit more old school, relying instead on a most-popular algorithm to select what goes on to its front page. The more something is read on Readability, the more likely it will appear on Top Reads. Crucially, the kind of data that Readability is putting together is not, for now at least, based on “learning” what you like or targeting you in any way. The data, and the user, remain anonymous. There are social elements, too, however. Following @topreads on Twitter, you will be able to get links to articles as they “heat up” on Readability. The same list will be accessible through the Readability app. While services like Pocket are extending to other kinds of media like video, Top Reads, as its name implies, is going to stick to the written word. “We want to really capture behavior around reading,” Ziade says. “We are focused on shedding light on how people read. They say reading is dying, that people mostly read tweets these days, but people are actually reading tons, and we want to be in the middle of that.”
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DoorJamz Is A Doorbell With Custom Tones You Can Control With Your Smartphone
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqRxabNynBo] I have two problems with doorbells. First, they sound incredibly annoying. Secondly, there isn’t an easy way to turn them off. DoorJamz provides a solution for both of these problems. It’s still a doorbell, but instead of the consistently infuriating “ding-dong”, you can choose to have it play whatever you like. If can have play whenever your guests or the Jehovah Witnesses announce their presence. That’s pretty cool. The DoorJamz is controlled from an app on your smartphone. Once a particular song or sound file is uploaded unto the app, it wirelessly transmits your new doortone to the DoorJamz. From the app, you can also schedule to have certain doortones ring on certain days. For example, on Halloween you can set your DoorJamz to play a howling wolf, a cackling witch, or maybe an audio recording of you screaming “I DON’T HAVE CANDY” followed by a long string of curses whenever those trick or treaters come to call. But the best feature, and one parents everywhere will appreciate, is that you can lower the DoorJamz’s volume whenever you want. So if your baby is napping during the day, you can basically mute the DoorJamz until they wake up. It’s insane that the doorbells we have now can’t do this. A DoorJamz can be had for a $99 contribution at . They’re trying to raise $90,000 by May 1st.
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PETMAN Is A Humanoid Robot That Could Probably Walk Big Dog
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tFrjrgBV8K0] PETMAN is a humanoid robot made by Boston Dynamics. BD also created Big Dog, the quadrupedal, that haunts our dreams. This robot, shown here gussied up in a hazmat suit and gas mask, however, is far scarier. While I doubt he can do much right now without those cable support, just imagine PETMAN bopping up to you on a mission to keep you from entered a contaminated zone. First, he looks surprisingly life-like in this outfit and, second, he would be completely deaf to your entreaties. As they say, we’re living in the future. It’s just not evenly distributed yet. Plus, PETMAN can dance. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QRbvNL1PHKg]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 4 | null |
This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: Facebook Phone AKA The FF
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
This week on the we talk about bold moves by Verizon and T-Mobile and the Facebook Fone and Facebook Home. This week we welcome Darrell “Patents” Etherington to our soundstage and I’ve removed quite a bit of the messy static. We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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The Breathometer Will Ensure You Don’t Drive (Or Do Video Interviews) While Drunk
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
There’s a new handy little device for people who like to drink but want to be safe about it. The , which is currently for sale through a campaign on Indiegogo, was built to use the processing power of your mobile phone to provide an affordable way to allow users to check their blood alcohol content. And I got to take it for a spin. Breathometer founder Charles Michael Yim said that he had tried a few different consumer breathalyzers and found none of them were all that convenient. They were too bulky, too expensive, and cumbersome in terms of having to calibrate them. Most people are probably not aware of the availability of consumer breathalyzers, and so Yim and his team decided to make a device that was more affordable and accessible for the average consumer. The Breathometer is available as part of an that the company is running now through April 13. It’s structured in a way that how soon you’ll receive a device depends on how much you contribute. So someone who contributes $100 will be part of the company’s first drop-shipment of the device in July, whereas someone who puts in just $20 shouldn’t expect the device before early next year. I had a few drinks ahead of the interview, to try the thing out for myself, and, well, for science. What I found was that the Breathometer was accurate in establishing that Yim was stone-cold sober, while I blew a 0.04. And while that means I was probably ok to drive, maybe I shouldn’t have been conducting a video interview under the influence. Whew. Check out the full video above!
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Drawbridge Partners With TRUSTe To Let Consumers Opt Out Of Its Cross-Device Ad Targeting
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
Mobile ad startup offers technology that — something that’s pretty appealing to advertisers, but could also have significant privacy implications. Drawbridge is announcing today that it’s partnering with privacy management company so that people who see Drawbridge-served ads can opt out of the targeting. We hear about companies working with TRUSTe all the time — there are enough of them that announcements can start to feel pretty ho-hum. But the Drawbridge partnership seemed worth pointing out because it’s another sign that TRUSTe’s AdChoices model, where consumers can opt out of data collection and targeting, is . And it’s also the first time that opting out has applied across multiple devices. Founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan said that as with other TRUSTe-enabled mobile ads, ads served by Drawbridge will now carry an AdChoices icon. If you click on the icon, you’ll get the option to avoid any interest-based ad targeting from TRUSTe partners, or to avoid any Drawbridge ads. Once you’ve opted out, that choice will apply across all the devices that Drawbridge knows are yours, Sivaramakrishnan said — she described it as “a very conservative approach to privacy preference management.” VP of Product Eric Rosenblum added, “We always felt that a strong commitment to privacy controls was going to be important to our business model.” He noted that not many people actually use AdChoices to opt out, but it’s important to offer the option, he said, because “it would be a pity to in any way inhibit [cross-device ad targeting’s] growth because of people’s concerns about privacy.” And even if you don’t opt out, he and Sivaramakrishnan said that from the start, Drawbridge has not collected any personally identifiable information. I also asked whether the approach that Drawbridge takes to privacy might change if people become more comfortable with the technology over time, and Sivaramakrishnan said, “”We want to be setting the standard around this. But look, it’s an evolving space, it’s a new space. It’s sort of the next frontier. … That’s not to say there won’t be new thought processes along the way.” Drawbridge’s integration with AdChoices went live last week.
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Giveaway: New Relic Has Four Free Disrupt NY Tickets Plus Free RC Helicopters #Nerdlife
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Elin Blesener
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
Disrupt NY is less than a month away. Tickets are still available at the early bird discount, but only for one more week. Or you can save some cash and win a ticket here thanks to our partner New Relic. Fresh off of raising $80 million at a near-billion dollar valuation and announcing its mobile app monitoring offering, New Relic is footing the bill for four lucky winners this week. If that wasn’t enough, New Relic is also giving away free RC Helicopters to any developer who sets up their web or mobile monitoring on their applications. Want in? Here’s all you have to do to enter. 1) Retweet this post making sure to include the #Nerdlife hashtag in the tweet. We will post the winners at the bottom of this post on Monday after 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet once, or you will be disqualified. New Relic will make sure you follow the step above and choose the four winners once the giveaway is over. Please note the free Disrupt tickets are for one ticket per winner only and do not include airfare or hotel. 1) and try New Relic’s Web Monitoring service or their newer Mobile Monitoring service (some basic dev skills required). You’ll get data on your web apps with your New Relic account and 14 days of their best PRO level of service for free. No worries, no obligation to buy whatsoever. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op1i0B8-dJA]
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Sneak Peek: Babblr Readies A Real-Time Chat Client For Tumblr
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 |
If is , then may be just the thing that its users are clamoring for: It’s an integrated chat client for the platform that lets you communicate with your Tumblr friends and followers and organize your community into groups. The idea, now in beta, comes from a few folks who currently work at e-commerce company . They’re all active Tumblr users themselves, and were inspired to build Babblr because of their own passion for Tumblr and social media in general. According to Babblr co-founder Brandon Sowers, between himself and Babblr’s other creators, Brett Williams and Trevor Clarke, they have a combined 700,000 Tumblr followers. “We’re always looking at new, innovative ways to communicate with our fans,” says Sowers. Today, Tumblr’s social features are more lightweight – its users can follow others’ blogs, favorite posts, and re-blog content while adding their own 2 cents, but direct communication between users isn’t possible. “People want to communicate in realtime with their followers,” Sowers explains, “and this is a great tool for that.” Babblr isn’t overly complex software. It’s not that much different from other on-site chat clients, in fact. The difference is that it’s built on top of the Tumblr API, and through a Chrome extension launching in a few weeks, it will integrate directly into your Tumblr dashboard. After authenticating with Tumblr, the Babblr interface shows you a list of followers and those you’re following, and lets you initiate instant messaging-like chats with others on Babblr. You can also organize your followers into groups, which is useful for those with larger communities, or who just want to have more directed conversations. The messaging app is designed to be family-friendly, too, as it censors curse words by turning them into silly or nonsense phrases like “fudge this” or “schmeggs.” (The F word and S word, respectively.) The Babblr team has been working on the client for about six months, and as of two months ago, they allowed people to discover it on their own through search and other posted links, in order to try it out. As of now, Babblr has 25,000 users who have since done so. In fact, a post teasing the client’s development which Williams posted to his own Tumblr blog ended up with more than 200,000 “notes.” “We got 25,000 emails that day from people wanting whatever this chat was at the time,” says Sowers. “It’s pretty insane when you see something like that,” he adds. Of the now 25,000 users who have set up Babblr accounts, the majority of them are female, ages 16 through 24 – something which lends support to reports of Tumblr’s popularity among a younger demographic. Around 80 percent of those who signed up are also U.S.-based. Today’s “launch” of Babblr is still really more of a sneak peek than it is a public debut. The client is in beta and won’t be available on Tumblr dashboards until the Chrome extension is finished up. But Sowers says that part is almost done. When Babblr launches in a couple of weeks, it will be free to download, but the plan is to shortly thereafter begin charging a 99-cent fee for the download after word spreads. All three co-founders still work at Sevenly and are bootstrapping the project with their own “passion, sweat and tears,” says Sowers. You can . More to come.
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Music Video Company VEVO Learns Dutch, Launches In The Netherlands
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
just became available in a whole new market, as its streaming music video service was today. The launch will make more than 75,000 music videos available to Dutch viewers, and brings the total number of countries that it operates in to 11. The Netherlands launch comes as VEVO has been expanding availability worldwide. The company already serves music video fans in a number of countries, including the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. As with all the other markets that VEVO operates in, the site will be localized for Dutch visitors, and the site will feature both international and local artists. In The Netherlands, that means featuring artists like , , , , and . And, of course, it will have lots of great advertising for local viewers. Which, after all, is why any media company ever enters a new market — because it can monetize. In The Netherlands, that means brand marketers like Beslist, Citroen, Imgroma, Ralph Lauren, and Vodafone are putting their ads on VEVO. While VEVO is launching in new countries, it’s also continuing to innovate on the product side of things. That means making the service available on all sorts of devices — like apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, as well as a new Xbox app that’s due to come out next week. Oh yeah, and there’s that little matter of the , a whole new live channel of music videos programmed by human beings, no algorithms allowed! VEVO TV will make watching music videos online almost like watching MTV back in the day, that day being when MTV used to play music videos. But sorry international viewers — for now, VEVO TV is only available in the U.S. and Canada!
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With Over 6,000 Courses Now Live, Udemy Brings Its Learning Marketplace To iOS To Let You Study On The Go
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
launched in 2010 to help students of all ages continue their education through video-based, online courses — and in turn, give teachers (and experts) a way to make a buck by sharing their knowledge with the masses. Capitalizing on the growing interest and buzz around online learning and MOOC platforms pioneered by sites like Khan Academy, Udemy has been on a mission to create the largest online destination for on-demand, online courses. The popular MOOC platforms like Coursera, Udacity, edX and Khan Academy are all, in one way or another, on a similar mission; so, to differentiate itself, rather than offer classes for free, Udemy offers both free and paid courses, putting it more in the vein of platforms like Skillshare and Lynda.com. Since raising $12 million in December, Udemy has been looking to continue differentiating itself from the increasingly crowded market for online courses by giving students access to its catalog on the go. Today, the startup released — its first native mobile product — in an attempt to make it easy for users to discover and take courses from their smartphones. The Udemy marketplace is growing fast, and now offers more than 6,000 courses on a range of topics from web development and business to photography, music and fitness. Udemy has added 1,000 courses since December, a big uptick from October, when it added just over 400 courses to its platform. With its new app, Udemy now allows users to browse and sign up for both free and paid courses, giving them access to video lectures, articles and presentations while on the go. The app also lets students save their courses for offline viewing to peruse during their morning commute, along with the ability to watch video lectures in multiple speeds. Courses in double-time. Udemy’s iOS apps don’t yet offer the same social elements available in its Web product (those that allow students to interact with their peers, for example), but the founders tell us that these will likely be coming in future updates. In turn, with its iOS app now live, Udemy will look to bring its online learning marketplace to Android, so look for that in the coming months. Since launching in January, the founders say, over 15,000 additional experts have committed to share courses on Udemy, including familiar names like Dan Rather, George Lucas, and Randal Kleiser. Since December, Udemy has grown from 400K registered students to over 600K, and a quarter of its approved instructors have pulled in at least $10K by offering paid instruction through Udemy — and some have even pushed into the six-figure range. Udemy takes 30 percent of those earnings, co-founder Eren Bali told us in December that, over the last nine months, the company has seen steady 20 percent month-over-month growth. Sources also tell us that Udemy has generated over $15 million in total revenue since its launch, which continues to grow. A number Udemy will look to grow as it pushes onto mobile. For more, find
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Opinions Differ Widely On The Effectiveness of Apple’s Apology In China
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
Tim Cook’s apology to Apple’s Chinese customers has divided observers, some of whom claim that the public mea culpa might undermine the Cupertino company by giving credence to government criticism. Cook’s letter was (link via Google Translate) on the Chinese Apple Web site on Monday after two weeks of heated attacks by China’s state-run media. Cook focused on Apple’s communication over its warranty and said the company would change its repair policy for iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S devices sold in China. “We realize a lack of communication in this process has led to speculation that Apple is arrogant and doesn’t care about or value consumers’ feedback,” wrote Cook. “We sincerely apologize for any concern or misunderstanding this has brought to customers. The wording of Cook’s apology made it seem like a direct response to , the Chinese government’s official newspaper, that called the company “arrogant,” as well as a China Central Television’s investigative program that claimed Apple’s warranty practices s against Chinese iPhone owners. (Other recent attacks by state-run media agencies included , which blamed Apple for an increase in high-interest loans taken out by students to buy “fancy electronic products.”) At stake is Apple’s second-biggest and fastest-growing market: “Greater China” (the term used to describe the market including China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) accounted for 13 percent of Apple’s sales last year. Cook’s apology earned the Cupertino company pats on the head by the state media and government officials. The Global Times, published by the People’s Daily, , “the company’s apology letter has eased the situation, softening the tense relationship between Apple and the Chinese market.” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei old the press during a daily news briefing that “we approve of what Apple said.” Despite the onslaught of highly critical articles, many Chinese netizens about the charges against Apple. In fact, the company may have undermined its positive image among consumers by issuing an apology, Shaun Rein, managing director and founder of China Market Research Group, . “After the criticism started taking place, my firm went out and interviewed about 30 Chinese consumers. The vast majority of them said ‘why is the media attacking Apple? Apple is known for great service,'” Rein said. “The consumers are saying the media should be attacking, say the pigs in the river, which is really disgusting.” “The problem with Apple apologizing is that it gives credibility to the state media attacks,” Rein added. “We’ve gone out and interviewed consumers and they say ‘wait a minute. We supported Apple, but now they’re apologizing. Maybe there is something to all the criticisms by the state media.” Analysts in favor of the apology said it was necessary because the company still needs to curry favor with the Chinese government. Apple’s hardware competes with domestic rivals like Huawei and Lenovo, and Chinese companies are beginning to develop OSes like and that are meant to chip into the dominance of Western software. Furthermore, after , Apple has yet to ink a deal with China Mobile, the Chinese state-owned telecom that is the world’s largest mobile phone operator with –another reason why the company wants to stay on the Chinese government’s good side. “They’re out of the woods and into the weeds. Things will rarely be smooth for Apple in China–even if consumers love it there will always be factions in and out of government that are trying to take it down,” Michael Clendenin, managing director of technology consultancy RedTech Advisors, . “Apple made it easy this time, but they have learned to be more proactive. The next time they stumble, it will be easier to recover.” But other observers say that Cook’s apology may actually be a sign that the Cupertino company is worried about its grip on the Chinese marketplace. Zhou Jiangong, the editor-in-chief of Forbes China, that “Cook’s apology is not only a failure in the company’s public relations, but more importantly, it reflects the weakening position of Apple’s brand and innovation capacity. Apple still provides good products, but does not create demand by innovation anymore, like what it did before.” As its advantage in hardware is eroded, Apple will have to focus on localizing its software, which requires the support of local authorities, Zhou added. Meanwhile, rites that Android’s continuing dominance in China may have underpinned Apple’s decision to apologize. Keck cites a report by Beijing-based mobile app analytics platform Umeng that shows that at the end of 2012, there were 160 million active Android users in China, compared to 85 million iOS users. Another report by Android phone management software startup Wandoujia found that there were even more Android users in China–224 million–than estimated by Umeng–and that by the end of this year, the number will increase to 300 million Android. “To be clear, the extraordinary growth of the Android OS in China is coming at Apple’s expense,” Keck said.
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LocalSqr Announces Partnership with Saks Fifth Avenue On Employee Healthy Eating Program
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
is an app that aims to encourage healthy eating by promoting locally grown food. The app locates farmers markets and other organic produce suppliers in your vicinity, and if you end up shopping at one of these locations often, it rewards you with a special discount you can redeem from the vendors there. It’s a little like an app we reviewed today called that rewards people who take their prescriptions meds on time with coupons and gift cards to popular retailers like Gap and Target. It’s strange to think that people will refuse to eat healthier foods or take their meds on time unless an app rewards them for doing so. That’s just the gamification of life in full effect, and if and recent succeses are any indication, it’s something that appears to work pretty well. LocalSpr is also launching a dedicated effort for companies to adopt the app in their corporate wellbeing programs. They’re calling this the , a wellness program that is designed to educate employees on how to eat healthier. LocalSpr recently partnered with Saks Fifth Avenue and conducted a eight week pilot program using a test group of 165 employees. Each Saks employee received a weekly email that gave them nutrition advice and healthy recipes. They were given challenges as well, like one that asked employees to eat a different meal everyday for breakfast. Employees were also asked to keep a dedicated food dairy, and of course, encouraged to use the LocalSpr app whenever possible. When the test group was surveyed at the end of the program, 52 percent were found to have cooked at home more and 57 percent purchased food from local markets. Of course, it’s not certain if that was largely an effect of the program or the LocalSpr app, but Saks is pleased with the result and has plans to expand the Go Local program nationwide this year to its 11,000 employees spread over 115 locations. There’s just a part of me that feels a little sad that we’ve come to the point where the only way some of us will eat healthier, organic foods is if there’s an app for that. In any case, LocalSqr is a at the iOS App Store. [gallery ids="790500,790501,790502,790503,790504"]
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Twitter Introducing New Card Types, Mobile App Installs And Deep Linking, At Developer Meetup
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
Well, it looks like the developer meetup over at Twitter is underway, and information is making its way out over Twitter about it. It sounds like the company is unveiling some new types, which are its way of displaying embedded content within tweets, and it’s all about mobile apps. Tomorrow, the Cards will be released, and the hope is to get deeper linking and engagement into other apps you may have on your phone. This could be for shopping, taking a poll or just about any other interaction you can think of. Other Card types include things like embedded photo galleries, as these tweets show: [tweet https://twitter.com/davemcclure/status/319271264487350272] [tweet https://twitter.com/davemcclure/status/319270611098664961] Developers have long wanted more access to this prime real estate, which could turn Twitter into a valuable resource to sell goods, digital music or anything in between. Sadly, press wasn’t invited to tonight’s gathering, but the tweets are flying. AllThingsD had that this was going to be what we’d see. CEO of social polling app Seesaw Aaron Gotwalt seemed pleased: [tweet https://twitter.com/gotwalt/status/319270148118827009] A , giving a bit more explanation and direction on app installs and deep linking within apps: One of the most important features in the new Cards is the ability to allow users to download your app (if the user doesn’t already have it installed), or deep-link into your own app (if the app is already installed on the user’s mobile device). The ability to enable app installs and deep-linking is globally available across all Twitter Card types – you’ll just need to add a new set of markup tags as detailed below. App Installs By adding these new footer tags to your markup, you’ll be able to specify downloads for users who’ve not yet installed your app on their device. This will work across iPhone, iPad, and Android (Google Play). Please note that if you have an iPhone app, but no iPad-optimized app, you should include the iPhone app id, name, and url for both iPhone and iPad-related tags. When no value is provided, the Cards will simply render a “View on web” link pointing to the value in twitter:url. Below is an example of what the prompt will look like if the user does not have the app installed: Deep-Linking If a user does have the application installed, you can specify a deep-link into the correlated resource within your own application. When a user clicks on the “Open in app” tap target, Twitter will send that user out into your application. This value is specified in the “twitter:app:name:(iphone|ipad|googleplay)” tags. The app url should be your app-specific URL Scheme (requires registration within your app) that launches your app on the appropriate client. Of course, all of these new Card types will keep users within Twitter more and will build a better relationship with app developers, including tracking engagement analytics closely for companies. At least we know . In addition to analytics, Twitter will now bring in more revenue for promoted tweets, as app developers will immediately see Twitter as a way to drive installs. It makes complete sense and .
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Rovio Taps Brightcove To Stream Toons Into All Its Angry Birds Apps
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
If you’re a big Angry Birds fan — and really, WHO ISN’T — then you’ve probably noticed that there’s no longer just games available in the franchise apps. Rovio, the studio behind the most popular iOS app of all time, is now extending beyond gaming to also , or Toons. And those Toons are, unsurprisingly, being distributed through its huge network of app downloads. But Rovio needed some help to get those videos to play on all the mobile and connected TV apps that users have downloaded over the years. The company is making a new episode of its Toons available every Sunday on all 1.7 billion of them, which is no small feat. So the game maker turned to Brightcove, which has what seems like eons of video distribution experience, as well as APIs for delivering video into native apps. According to Brightcove founder Jeremy Allaire, Rovio is using Brightcove Cloud to ingest and manage all of its Toons content and metadata. Using the Brightcove Video Cloud platform, Rovio was able to quickly turn up delivery of its Toons through a native Brightcove player on iOS and Android devices. And it’s also helped to enable distribution for viewing on a bunch of connected TVs, where some Angry Birds apps live, and where viewership of its Toons makes a lot of sense. Like other clients, Rovio pays a license for access to Brightcove’s Video Cloud, according to Allaire. That license is based on the viewership scale that Rovio expects and the features they need. All of which is probably a ton cheaper than building out all their own video distribution infrastructure and running it themselves.
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Simple.TV Raises $5.7 Million From New World Ventures To Move Beyond Its DVR Box
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
There is no shortage of hardware devices looking to change the way people watch TV. But most of those devices serve to stream services like Netflix or Hulu into people’s living rooms. In that respect, is a bit of an outlier, as it performs all the usual functions as a DVR, but it can then stream video that it captures to other devices. Well, the Simple.TV team has even broader ambitions than just that one box, and the team has raised $5.7 million to realize them. The Simple.TV box was pitched mostly as a way for cord cutters to record programming that comes off of HD antennas, and to later stream those recordings to a wide range of connected devices. After connecting storage to their Simple.TV boxes, users could use the device to record individual episodes or full seasons of their favorite shows, then watch them on apps for iOS, Android, and Roku devices. In that respect, it was kind of like a combination TiVo-plus-Slingbox in one.* Last May, Simple.TV introduced its first hardware device . The company raised nearly double its original $125,000 goal, selling more than 1,000 devices as part of its first run. Later in the fall, the company shipped devices to consumers who backed the campaign, and also , at $149 a piece. But the company has broader ambitions than just being a hardware manufacturer with some cool software attached. The Simple.TV set ups has a sleek programming guide to help users find, access, and record their favorite programs, and that will be a key part of what seems like a new direction for the company. According to founder and CEO Mark Ely, Simple.TV is looking to find ways to take its discovery and access platform and expand beyond just broadcast content through a digital antenna. It’s also looking to include cable content and over-the-top content from services like Netflix and Hulu as part of a broader consumer-facing opportunity. In addition to more content, Simple.TV is also looking for ways to get on more devices. While it currently has apps on iOS, Android, and Roku for streaming back pre-recorded content, Ely says the company sees an opportunity to work with third-party CE manufacturers. So you won’t have to have a Simple.TV device to use the Simple.TV apps on these new devices. With that in mind, the Simple.TV guys are also ready to move beyond bootstrapping, and the company has confirmed a $5.7 million funding round detailed in this . The funding round was led by New World Ventures, with NWV partner Matt McCall joining Simple.TV’s board of directors. Also listed on the filing are Simple.TV CEO Mark Ely and CTO Bruce Randall, along with Accanto Partners founding partner Robert Doris. Doris worked with the Simple.TV founders at Sonic Solutions, which was back in late 2010. ==
* It’s probably worth noting that TiVo has released the $129 to enable users to watch things they’ve recorded or are recording, and to download shows to their devices. That is, provided that the mobile device, TiVo, and TiVo stream are all on the same home network.
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Aereo CEO Explains How Recent Court Win Further Validates Partnership Opportunities
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
Aereo has been making waves of late, in its with network broadcasters over the legality of Aereo’s live streaming/DVR system that brings HD video content to any of your devices for a pay-as-you-go option or monthly subscription cost. Plus, that Aereo may be in talks with major ISPs and TV providers like Dish, DirecTV, and AT&T. Many have said that Aereo’s legal issues with a large group of major network broadcasters like Fox, NBC, etc. have become a liability working against Aereo in these acquisition/partnership talks. However, in an interview with TechCrunch, CEO and founder explained that this latest win is actually further validating Aereo’s stability as a disruptor in the industry. In fact, he believes that this latest move by the court will be beneficial. Though he wouldn’t name any companies specifically, Kanojia did mention that Aereo is talking to “a lot” of companies who are all “very interested” in working with Aereo. In the end, “it’ll all come back down to what brings the most benefit to the consumer,” said Kanojia. “We’re not going to partner with someone for the sake of partnering with them.” And has this latest legal win swayed companies in the Aereo direction? Well, Kanojia didn’t confirm anything specifically but he did say that conversations are happening constantly. In terms of the legal battle, Kanojia doesn’t seem the slightest bit worried. “It’s a financial drain and an intellectual drain,” he admits, but it’s also the nature of the industry. Kanojia mentioned that, if you look at the history of the TV industry, any real change or innovation was predicated on the backs of dozens of case filings with the courts. It’s a stubborn industry, but those are often the most ripe for change. “So the fact that you’re being attacked by big players in the industry is actually a good sign, right?” I asked Kanojia. And while he wouldn’t actually call his company’s legal stresses a positive thing, he definitely believes that the court case (and especially the latest rulings) are beneficial in validating Aereo’s place in the market.
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Spoof ‘Startup’ Vooza Gets Serious About What It’s Really Up To — A New Kind Of Web Advertising
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
Yesterday we saw a lot of from tech companies, with varying degrees of success. To help shake off that April Fool’s Day hangover, , the satirical “startup” that has been putting out spot-on parodies of modern tech company culture since with fake (but scarily real sounding) buzzwords like “ ,” is coming clean about what it’s really up to — creating a fresh kind of web-based advertisement for startups. The official explanation, Vooza’s creator and professional comedian (perhaps better known as Vooza’s CEO “ “) tells me, is this: “Vooza is a video content platform targeted at the startup world that uses native video advertising integrated into the experience.” In plain English, that means that startups and other advertisers have been paying Vooza to include them in videos that take the piss out of the whole “startup” scene. The team behind Vooza is called , and it’s a group of full-time NYC comedians, directors and editors who have specialized for years in the business of making people laugh. It’s something that’s been pretty darn successful. So far, Vooza’s clients have included email newsletter startup , app analytics platform , branding firm and others. The companies pay to have their brand worked into a segment written by Vooza’s writers and featuring its cast of characters — the video then goes out to Vooza’s own audience, and can also be used by the company in any way they wish. Vooza founder Matt Ruby doing his best Steve Jobs It’s a business model that can be classified as branded content or sponsored product placement, but Ruby says that he thinks of it more as “a throwback to the old school TV advertising model when the stars of a show would do the ads, like Johnny and Ed .” Thus far, all the growth in clients reaching out to work with Vooza has occurred organically on a case-by-case basis — and it’s not exactly something that Ruby had planned for initially when he started making his first Vooza videos. But now, he said, he’s looking to scale things out a bit more, and amp up Vooza as a real business. He put it like this: “When it comes to advertising, the big brands, the Snickers and the Toyotas, are all going through ad agencies. That’s not who we’re going after. There are many companies out there, especially in the startup space, who would never think they’d advertise in video or on TV, but they would come to Vooza and say, ‘Let’s make a fun video together.'” It’s a fresh angle that could be hitting at a good time for its niche. Upstart tech companies have more and more competition these days, and advertising is a tried-and-true way to help differentiate your brand from others — but traditional modes can be expensive. Meanwhile, founders nowadays know it’s . It’ll be fun to see what comes out of Vooza in the future. Oh, and what does Ruby think about all those April Fool’s ? “I have to say, I usually ignore it,” he said. “I’m a little of a comedy snob. Sometimes when people try to be funny, it kind of makes you cringe.” Here’s an example of a sponsored video by Vooza, done for MailChimp:
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Zynga Shares Rise 5% In After-Hours On Real-Money Games Launch Tomorrow
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
on news that the company is launching its first real-money games in the U.K. tomorrow. The company is through a partnership with bwin.party, one of the world’s biggest real-money gaming operators. At first, the games will be downloadable or on the web, but Zynga plans to bring them to Facebook and mobile platforms later in the year. They could come to U.S. players later, but only as state or federal laws will allow. A handful of states, including Nevada and New Jersey, have passed legislation to allow online gambling. Under financial pressures from a long period of slow economic growth, about a dozen or more states are also considering pushing legal online gambling forward. But many of these laws favor existing land-based casinos ahead of companies that are purely online. Zynga might be pressured to partner with a casino there to make it work, even though they filed an Application for a Preliminary Finding of Suitability from the Nevada Gaming Control Board last December. As for the launch tomororw, Zynga’s U.K. arm and bwin.party plan to launch games that could include as many as 180 other casino titles like roulette and blackjack over the year. The poker title is basically an online poker room, while the casino title has about 160 familiar betting games. Zynga already has a very successful Poker title on iOS and Facebook that uses virtual currency. Zynga Poker was the company’s very first social game, the highest grossing app of 2012 on the iOS app store chart, and Zynga’s second-highest grossing title last year behind FarmVille. The Zynga Poker title generated 19 percent of Zynga’s online game revenue last year, or $217.4 million alone, . So if the company were able to add real-money gaming, which would increase average revenues per user substantially, . The thing is that real-money gaming is incredibly competitive in the U.K. Even though revenues rise per user, so do marketing costs as real-money gaming companies are pressured to spend an order of magnitude more to lure the most lucrative players. Total revenues may rise, but it doesn’t mean profits increase proportionally.
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TC Cribs: NerdWallet’s ‘Nerd Lair’, Where Pyramids Of Diet Coke Fuel Many A Pull-Up Competition
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
It’s unfortunate, but true: Since venture capital funding rounds often provide a straightforward time to meet and report on growing tech companies, awesome bootstrapped startups sometimes slip under our radar here at TechCrunch. Up until now, that’s been the case with , the personal money management and advisory platform that has bootstrapped its way to profitability, a full-time staff of more than 30, and a sweet office in downtown San Francisco — all since 2009, and without a dime of VC funding. So hopefully we made up for some lost time with this latest episode of . Co-founder and COO led the way for our long-overdue look around NerdWallet HQ, and we really liked what we found: A beautifully designed space furnished with pyramids of Diet Coke, designated “Nerding” rooms, a conference room/DJ booth, a few very well-dressed canine friends, a front-and-center set of monkey bars perfect for impromptu pull-up competitions, and much more. Check it all out in the video above!
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First Render Of HTC’s ‘Facebook Phone’ Reportedly Leaks Ahead Of Thursday Event
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
The HTC hardware that’s being prepped as the delivery mechanism for , supposedly leaked in the image above. The render, , a consistent source of pre-release Android hardware info, doesn’t look like much: it’s destined to be a mid-range device, after all, according to early leaks. The leak also suggests it’ll be called the HTC First, which sounds like a not-so-great play on the HTC One naming scheme. Previous info had it codenamed the HTC Myst, which at least brought to mind the popular point-and-click adventure game. The name ‘First’ at least evokes the idea that you’ll be the first of your friends to spot all the activity going down on Facebook, but again, don’t expect the hardware to account for any of the ‘wow’ factor of . What we’ve heard about the phone itself so far indicates a modest but capable performer, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 5 megapixel rear camera and a 4.3-inch display capable of 720p HD resolution. It’s so yawn-inducing that if Facebook spends more than two minutes on hardware and specs on Thursday, I might actually nod off. But it’s an example of what Facebook can offer other OEMs, regardless of device specs: the angle of ‘it’ll even run on your broadly aimed pre-paid handsets’ is a good one for FB’s purposes of establishing a much wider, more entrenched mobile platform. Even if the phone itself does look a little like a cheap iPhone knock-off.
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Tesla Motors Partners With Wells Fargo And US Bank To Finance Model S Electric Cars
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
Today, Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors to allow consumers to finance its , thanks to a partnership with Wells Fargo and US Bank. The company says that this is a new kind of financing product that “combines the surety and comfort of ownership with all the advantages of a traditional lease.” So while this isn’t a straight-up lease, this is a hybrid that is as close to owning one of these cars as you’re going to get without paying cash for it. The “true net out of pocket cost” for a Model S with this deal is less than $500. After three years you’ll be able to turn the car in for cash or equivalent trade-in. Here’s how it works, it’s not as complicated as it sounds, but it is pretty genius math and marketing: If you want to keep the car after three years, you simply continue making payments for another two years. The advantage to this approach is that you’re never locked in like a lease and that consumers are “building equity” in their vehicle, Musk explained during the conference call today. Tesla has updated its website and offers more details on the program, based on where you live: The announcement came along with a video featuring Musk, providing a personal guarantee on the Tesla Model S, which he says is “the world’s best car”: Also during the call, Musk was asked what his net worth was, which is tied to what the founder means when he says he’s “putting my money where my mouth is.” If Tesla cannot pay a customer the residual value for a Model S, Musk will do so personally. While he didn’t give an exact number, he said that reports by Forbes, which , “weren’t far off.” Before you go and , take a look at our Model S test drive from last year:
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Watch ‘The Daily Show’ Clip That Sparked Twitter Ire Between Egypt’s President And The U.S. Embassy
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
[tweet https://twitter.com/EgyPresidency/status/319135360586244097] Twitter became the between the United States and Egypt, after the American embassy tweeted an episode of The Daily Show, which tore into the oppressive tactics of President Mohammed Morsi. “@USEmbassyCairo @TheDailyShow @DrBassemYoussef It’s inappropriate for a diplomatic mission to engage in such negative political propaganda,” responded the official account of Egypt’s president. Egypt has since the election of Morsi. Most recently, he arrested the host of a satirical news show, Bassem Youssef, after promising that no critic of the president would be harmed. No surprise, Daily Show host Jon Stewart went after Morsi is a (brilliant) 10 minute sketch. Tweeting such a searing critique of Morsi not only shows the increasing power of Twitter in diplomatic relations, but reveals how bad negotiations have gotten between Egypt and the U.S.. Watch the episode that started it all below:
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Romain Dillet
| 2,013 | 4 | 5 | null |
Chrome Extension Makes Google’s April Fools Joke Real
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
If you were one of the who watched Google’s Gmail Blue video yesterday and found yourself wondering just horrible it’d be if it weren’t, you know, a joke — you’re in luck! Thrown together overnight by developer , the aptly named takes every terrible detail from the video (embedded below for good measure) and brings it to life. The “Compose” button? Blue. The word “Compose”? Blue. Underline? Blue! Yeah, yeah — it’s just a quick CSS hack applied to any detected instance of Gmail, but imagine all the … … hipster cred* you’ll get from your friends and colleagues when they find out that you Gmail Blue! Now, if someone could go ahead and make that actually makes my laptop emit scents, that’d be great. Come on. It’s like 2 lines of code. cough. [* fact: hipster cred is an accepted currency in most major West Coast cities.] [Pro tip: If you install this and find yourself hating the world thirty seconds later, just go to in Chrome and uncheck the “Enabled” box next to the extension]
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DailyLook Gets $2.5M From GRP Partners, Rachel Zoe, And Others To Be The Web’s Go-To For Fast Fashion
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
has become a huge force in retailing, as seen by the increasing ubiquity of stores such as , , , , and the like. But while those companies are clearly dominating High Streets all over the world, their chief focus is in the brick-and-mortar realm, and the web has been an afterthought at best. A Los Angeles-based startup called is setting its sights on being the go-to fast fashion brand based completely on the web — the e-commerce answer to H&M. To do that, the company has raised a healthy $2.5 million seed round from a number of investors, including , , , , , , and . DailyLook, which carries items from other brands and also produces its own label through relationships with many of the same manufacturers used by the big fast fashion retailers, has been around and quietly building an audience since its bootstrapped launch back in 2011, founder and CEO Brian Ree told me in a recent interview. Through word of mouth, the company, which has a full-time staff of 20, has grown its user base to some 400,000 members that subscribe to its email newsletter. A full “DailyLook” outfit, for sale as an ensemble and as separate items DailyLook’s first business model was a “flash sale” type deal, with items from one new head-to-toe look sold each day for a limited period of time. Now, DailyLook is de-emphasizing the daily sale angle and shifted its strategy to a more standard e-retail model, offering a variety of clothes and accessories at all times on its site (though certain complete looks are offered at discounted prices for limited times.) Through it all, according to Ree, curation is still a key part of what the site aims to do. “A lot of the fast fashion brands have gotten so big that their selection is overwhelming for the customer. The store is so huge, there are so many trendy styles, and it’s difficult for the average shopper to put together a beautiful curated outfit,” Ree said. “Our core concept is to be this brand that offers a styling experience, head-to-toe, with all of the actual products you need available right there.” Right now those styling tips are offered by the site’s staff, which pulls together suggested looks. Another new feature called “ ” lets DailyLook customers share photos of how they wear items bought from the site. Going forward, Ree said, the company plans to build out more personalization technology to help target specific looks and styles to individual customers. Also on deck are plans to expand internationally within the next year. While a key part of the consumer market seems to be slightly more expensive, often American-made “investment” type pieces when it comes to clothing and accessories (see , , and the like), fast fashion has certainly been in high demand for a number of years now — and realistically, it will probably not slow down any time soon. DailyLook seems to have a smart angle to catch that wave from the web side, and it will be an interesting brand to watch in the months ahead.
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SEC Says Reed Hastings-Style Announcements On Facebook And Twitter Are Okay, If Investors Told To Look There
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
Following an announcement that Netflix subscribers had passed the 1 billion hours viewed milestone, the SEC today announced that in specific circumstances, it can be . The one caveat they stipulate is that investors must be primed to watch those channels by companies if information is being released there first. The major issue at question was whether or not Hastings had violated Regulation Fair Disclosure (Regulation FD), which stipulates that companies must distribute info material to their financial success in a way designed to make sure it’s available as broadly and “non-exclusively” as possible. Hastings had publicly defended his actions, once again via Facebook, saying that since his reach is over 200,000 on Facebook, including reporters and bloggers, the company considered it a public channel. Plus, Hastings added, they didn’t really consider this particular milestone material to their business, since they’d announced via their blog that they were approaching that total anyways. The SEC’s report today agrees that social media channels are public, but those belonging to an individual corporate officer are unlikely to fall under the category of an acceptable means of conveying previously unreleased information material to a company’s bottom line is not okay, unless investors are told in advance to look for it there. The SEC puts it like this in a summary of its findings: The report of investigation explains that although every case must be evaluated on its own facts, disclosure of material, nonpublic information on the personal social media site of an individual corporate officer — without advance notice to investors that the site may be used for this purpose — is unlikely to qualify as an acceptable method of disclosure under the securities laws. Personal social media sites of individuals employed by a public company would not ordinarily be assumed to be channels through which the company would disclose material corporate information. Note that neither Netflix or Hastings are actually facing any kind of punishment for the original FB announcement; the SEC was just using it as a jumping off point to look into how social media might be used with respect to Regulation FD, since it recognized that there’s not much clarity around that issue as of yet. The area of social media and its role in the business news cycle remains one that not only the SEC, but also companies like Marketwire (now rebranded as ) are only beginning to adapt to. This new report comes as a reaction to real-world changing circumstances, but don’t expect it to be the last word, especially now that some kind of guidance has been issued which companies could potentially run afoul of.
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Monetization TBD … Instagram Hires Facebook’s Emily White As Director Of Business Operations
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
Instagram has hired a Director of Operations, the first of what we’re assuming will be many steps to monetize the photosharing app’s explosive scale and expand on for brand partnerships. Facebook’s Director of Mobile Partnerships, , will be moving over internally to the more than 20-person team, which just surpassed the in February. Emily White herself on Instagram. Described as a “really dynamic person” by one source, White was an early employee at Google, joining when the company was just at 200 employees and leaving when they were 22K. While at Google she helped build Google AdWords among other things. White joined Facebook in 2010, where she served as director of local and then mobile, primarily focused on getting Facebook on as many devices as possible — 2,500 at last count. She balances her day job with a board seat at yoga pants juggernaut Lululemon. A protegé of Sheryl Sandberg, White will be the first well-known veteran operator brought in to shepherd the young Instagram team. She could indeed become the photo app’s Sheryl Sandberg — turning Instagram’s under-leveraged popularity into serious revenue without seriously degrading the user experience. Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger will have time to focus on improving the mobile and web product while she takes the biz dev reins. “I’m excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team,” Systrom said on the move. “As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a major role in our future success.”
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There’s An App For That: Mango Health Gives Rewards For Taking Your Vitamins, Medicine Every Day
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 2 |
Staying true to a health or fitness regimen can be tough, but San Francisco-based . The seven-person startup just did a full launch of their app following a 16-week trial where they tracked whether regular notifications helped prescription drug takers keep on top of taking their medications every day. CEO Jason Oberfest, who came from a career in social gaming and networking with stints at DeNA’s Ngmoco and MySpace, said user retention in the trial beat what he saw with the mobile games he had launched in his previous career by three or four times. The trial was fairly small at just over 100 people. . (Android will come at a later point.) Mango Health takes tactics from the gaming world and applies them to one of the pharmaceutical industry’s toughest problems — prescription adherence. If people don’t stay on top of taking their medications properly, they could end up aggravating long-term health problems that could be more expensive to treat in the long run. Oberfest . “It’s such a pressing issue that some U.S. physicians now refer to it as a ‘silent epidemic’ facing the U.S. healthcare system,” he said. He says that the current ways the industry tries to treat this problem involve tracking patient consumption of medication or analyzing back office data to identify people who are at risk of falling off a regimen. A mobile app, with proper notifications and information about how to avoid harmful drug and food interactions, could be a more effective way of nudging people to stay on track. Patients who take their medications properly can get rewards like discounts or gift cards for Whole Foods and Gap. Mango Health’s app gamifies the whole process with eight different levels that offer different kinds of rewards that range up to $100 gift certificates or discounts. It also keeps a journal of medications and supplements that people take.
Mango Health’s revenue model has to balance many different interest groups. On the one hand, the company is working with brands to offer users rewards; it’s a practice borrowed from the social gaming world where brands would give offers to gamers if they downloaded titles or paid for virtual currency. Instead, in this model, these offers and rewards are used as a carrot to keep people taking their medications properly. “In the very end, good game design is about changing human behavior,” he said. “To be able to apply that in an area that can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives gets me so excited to come to work every day.” In turn, brands in the app get to reach a target market of people who care about their health and wellness. Mango is announcing a partnership with Target today, but Oberfest couldn’t comment on whether the retailer is paying the startup anything for being included in the app. On the other side, Mango Health could also work with health care organizations, HMOs or big employers that have health and wellness plans. Partnerships on this side could help health providers incentivize their patients or pool of insured customers to take steps that could prevent more expensive health problems in the long run. Mango has seven employees and has raised $3.1 million to date from investors, including First Round Capital, Baseline’s Steve Anderson, Floodgate’s Mike Maples, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and Square’s chief operating officer Keith Rabois. They also took a bit of extra seed funding recently from Bullpen Capital and Ray Rothrock, a Venrock partner that invested as an individual.
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Backed Or Whacked: iPads In Good Standing
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
Backed or Whacked first explored the murky underworld of iPad wearing devices . The saw its Kickstarter campaign whacked despite a temptation-inducing . With a resounding harumph regarding Kickstarter’s unfriendliness toward sales-oriented projects, inventor Peter Kielland . Unfortunately, he also fell short there, collecting less than $1,000 of his $50,000 goal. That double-dip in the pool of rejection, though, wasn’t enough to stop the GoPad, which is now not only after having sold out its initial run at $89, but is taking on a new version for the iPad mini. Perhaps Kielland’s persistence will inspire a trio of Kickstarter newcomers seeking to keep their favorite tablets at the ready as they use their hands to count their crowdfund-delivered bounty. Rhyming with “Diego,” (not “ego” or “Lego”) Trego most resembles the GoPad in its multipurpose design. Whereas the GoPad takes a more minimalist, stand-first approach and added a cover for a bit of on-the-go protection, the Trego attacks the problem from a standpoint of padded case primacy. It offers a few extra benefits, including the ability to use the iPad in portrait orientation, as well as extra storage for a wireless keyboard, charger and other items that don’t fit in your . For some time into the campaign, it appeared as though Trego was capable of holding nearly everything except the keys to success. However, late in the game, the project saw an unusual funding spurt clearing the finish line only $30 above its $20,000 goal. Ananda Svarupa Das, the Hawaiian creator of the Tribunga, describes his creation as a “triflex bipod,” but you can just call it that thing that looks like the terrifying body-engulfing alien serpent that haunts your nightmares. Like other products that have gone the crowdfunding route, such as Realize, Inc.’s , , the GorillaPod-like stand can be used to get your tablet into the ideal position for content consumption in bed or on the sofa. These capabilities are aptly demonstrated against the musical backdrop of in the campaign video. However, the Tribunga is no couch potato. It can support an iPad at chest level while standing or walking (although probably not with the degree of stability that the Trego provides). It also seems like it might work well as a video stabilizer if one deigns to touch it. With a backer price starting at $30, the Tribunga stood to be a relatively inexpensive way to keep your iPad or other portable electronic device on your person. However, the campaign wound down with only about 10 percent of the $20,000 requested. In a category of products that is a mass of metal placed within range of the magnet of dorkiness, the iWorm stands out. Resembling a mutated stethoscope, the iWorm braces the weight of the iPad — and the rest of its form — around the shoulder blades and chest. Creator Jeffrey Gu lays out the tongue-in-cheek ultimatum plainly: “Basically, you get to decide between having pain therapy or having the iWorm. There are only two choices in this world.” Gu stirs no controversy in readily admitting that the prototype could use some design enhancement. That said, the best design embellishment without a doubt is the presence of smiley faces on the two green balls that rest the iWorm against the front of the person with enough emotional fortitude to wear it. In the world of Gu, $18,000 is required to bring the iWorm to market. However, only a few people have been willing to pledge the $79 to acquire it, none of whom have ponied up for the $499 pledge level that includes a phone call from the inventor. Perhaps a Skype call delivered hands-free via the iWorm would have made a difference. Hmm. No. It wouldn’t have.
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Encouraging Female Engineers Is Key To Facebook’s Recruitment Strategy
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Billy Gallagher
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer and Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein , making Facebook by far the most represented company at . Their public remarks and comments shed light on Facebook’s aggressive strategy to recruit talented engineers to join their “deep bench” — the company’s greatest asset, according to Goldfein. “When you look at the numbers of CS majors that are graduating—where are we going to get more from?” Goldfein tells me. “The fact that women are such a small percentage of CS majors when they’re such a large percentage of undergraduates is kind of the missing link. And it’s really obvious when you think about it.” “The numbers are a challenge,” Schroepfer explains. “There are just fewer women graduating and fewer women in the industry. So I think there’s just a smaller pool of people and I think, because of that, if Facebook had gender parity, then everyone else in the industry wouldn’t, just statistically. So our first problem is not a Facebook problem, it’s an industry problem.” Goldfein has been heavily involved with she++, appearing in the documentary and speaking at both conferences. Schroepfer says the company does work with the Anita Borg Institute and Grace Hopper conference as well. For the past few years, Schroepfer and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have guest lectured once per quarter in Stanford’s introductory CS class; it’s become both a unique aspect of one of Stanford’s most popular classes and a great recruiting event for Facebook. “A lot of people take CS106A, the intro to computer science class, and it’s a phenomenal class, I think it’s the largest enrollment they’ve ever had this year,” he tells me. “But what you see happen is people take the class and then they move on to other things. They don’t actually end up majoring in computer science or being a professional in engineering. A lot of what we’re trying to do is just show up to the class and show people what it’s like to do this in the real world.” “Facebook has focused very hard on claiming our disproportionate share of the women that are out there,” Goldfein tells me. “Just like we want our disproportionate share of the people with iPhone experience, and we want our disproportionate share of the people with Kernel experience. There are a set of scarce, valuable, talent pools in software and we’re out to get more than our share. But that’s not a winning approach for the whole industry. Everybody can’t do that.” Goldfein and Schroepfer say they then turn their attention to the “pipeline problem” and work to increase the total number of software engineers in the world, namely by increasing the number of women. “We put a lot of energy into trying to find more women, because fundamentally for us it’s an applicant pool problem,” Goldfein says. “When women interview with us, we want to hire them and they want to work for us. Those numbers are great. The trouble is, there are just very few women we can find in the candidate pool.” This summer, the company is experimenting with a program called Facebook University to “reach further up the pipeline.” While traditional Facebook summer interns are college juniors and seniors or graduate students in computer science, the company wants to reach students finishing their freshman year of college; Goldfein says they will teach these students principles of coding, particularly for mobile, and give them a taste of what working at Facebook is like. She says the inaugural Facebook U class for this summer is 30 students, two thirds of whom are female.
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Marc Andreessen: The World Would Be Much Better If We Had 50 More Silicon Valleys
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Billy Gallagher
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of , delivered a keynote speech at the today, sharing what technology is exciting him right now, what he thinks about current startup culture, and how Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, affected his view of Silicon Valley. Andreessen described Google Glass as “potentially transformative for the entire industry. ” “You put it on and you’re like ‘Oh my God, I have the entire internet in my vision. Where have you been all my life?,’” he said. “I like to tell people that I’m beta testing the new Google Contact Lenses,” he joked to moderator Ruchi Sanghvi, VP of operations at Dropbox. He added that Facebook and Google are taking search in very different directions and opined “There’s a lot more to be done with search.” “New Facebook Graph Search capability I think is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen…It makes me wish a little bit that I was single again,” he said to laughter. Andreessen said he switches phones every six months (between Android and iPhone) and he’ll get Facebook Home next week. Sanghvi turned the discussion to Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In. “Before Sheryl’s book, for 20 years, the answer has been, ‘Be gender blind,’” Andreessen said. “’Be gender blind.’ It’s not important; in fact, it’s not to be discussed. It certainly should not be brought into the hiring criteria and certainly should not influence how people manage. And basically have a straight meritocracy and ignore gender. Sheryl has provided a very, very provocative set of arguments that 1) That’s not actually working and 2) That managers, both female and male, actually have to take gender on squarely.” “We’ll have to completely retrain managers and executives of all kinds to be able to do this,” he continued. “[Sandberg] argues very persuasively that it’s necessary, but it’s like landmine central with the way employment law works these days.” “I think her book has been a wake up call that the current approach to solving the problem of gender imbalance— number one it’s not working, which is fairly obvious, and number two, it requires a rethink of basic communication and basic management. I think it’s a very good thing to be talking about this and debating this. I think that it’s going to take quite a while,” he said. “Startups as a general category are probably highly overrated,” he said, responding to Sanghvi’s question about Stanford students graduating and deciding between starting companies and finding jobs. “Basically its an irrational act,” he said, explaining the right reason for starting a company. “This idea was so powerful and compelling that if I didn’t do it I’d hate myself for the rest of my life.” “I think that’s the part that’s getting lost,” he continued. “I think the cult of startups, and of course Stanford’s ground zero for this…Those startups are miserable experiences.” Andreessen argued that far too many entrepreneurs have an “incredible blind spot” to distribution, sales, and marketing in Silicon Valley right now, and shared his thoughts on immigration and innovation. Sanghvi finished her scripted segment (before an open Q&A period) by throwing out words and getting Andreessen’s reactions to them: “Mobile: under-hyped Social: extremely powerful, and people underestimate how powerful it is Enterprise: being reinvented Silicon Valley: the world would be much better if we had 50 more Silicon Valleys but we don’t and we probably won’t for a long time Genomics: largely a disappointment Big Data: lots of social, cultural, political implications, not yet figured out Aaron Swartz: tragedy. Absolute tragedy. Hopefully a future inspiration 2020: more people on the planet with smartphones than running water”
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Andreessen, Schroepfer, Others Rally For More Women In CS At She++ Conference
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Billy Gallagher
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
Marc Andreessen and Mike Schroepfer delivered keynote addresses today at the she++ conference, sharing their thoughts on women in technology and growing the pool of talented engineers. and , two Stanford juniors who study Symbolic Systems and CS, respectively, in January 2012 as a Stanford community for women in tech; Agarwal and Israni hope to spur girls in middle and high school to study CS, as well as their fellow Stanford students. Around 250 people attended the conference, half of which were Stanford students and about a quarter of which were high school students, according to Israni. “There’s something to be said about this community that everyone’s going through the same things, has some sort of story to share, irrespective of their age gap or career background,” Agarwal tells me. “That’s what’s made the conference such a success.” Schroepfer’s talk was unfortunately off the record, but I was able to catch up with him before it. “If we’re building technology that the whole population uses, then we should have people of all backgrounds building that technology so that they build it for the audience that is themselves,” he told me. Read about Andreessen’s talk here. Jocelyn Goldfein, a Director of Engineering at Facebook, presented and commented on the twelve-minute she++ documentary, in which she appears alongside Stanford students, professors, and alums. “First and foremost, [my passion for she++] starts as an employer,” Goldfein said in her presentation. “There are not enough great software engineers in the world.” Agarwal and Israni premiered the documentary to around 250 Stanford students on April 3; since then, they’ve received 60 sign ups to host screenings across the nation. They’ve also received requests in 8 different countries and are translating the documentary into 3 different languages. Eric Roberts, a computer science professor at Stanford, says in the documentary that if every student at Stanford graduated with a CS degree, the Valley would hire them all. The documentary, whose trailer you can see below, and conference shared many key themes, exploring why women don’t major in computer science in large numbers, and sharing personal stories from current Stanford undergraduates and women actively in the field. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vPPmhQNS6I] “I tell a lot of people, men and women, to fake it till you make it,” Goldfein says in the documentary. “Someday you’ll look around and realize you aren’t faking it anymore. That game face of confidence is actually how you feel.” Sandy Jen, CTO and Co-Founder of Meebo; Caroline Simard, Associate Director of Diversity and Leadership at the Stanford School of Medicine and Research consultant at the Anita Borg Institute; Debbie Sterling, CEO and Founder of GoldieBlox; and Donna J. H. Novitsky, CEO of Yiftee sat on a at the conference. They shared how they decided to become entrepreneurs, challenges they’ve faced, balancing their tech work and personal lives, and their biggest failures. Sterling said early in her process starting GoldieBlox she and her co-founder applied to a startup accelerator that was very male-dominated. They walked into a room of “about 80 19-year olds in hoodies” with their prototype hidden under a napkin, and another applicant asked, “Oh, did you bring us cookies?” GoldieBlox was not accepted to the accelerator and her co-founder quit, but Sterling kept after the company as a sole founder. Agarwal and Israni organized the first last April, which featured Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, Irene Au, head of user experience at Google, Julia Hartz, CEO and Co-Founder of Eventbrite, and Goldfein, among others. “Last year we were just a conference and now we’re so much more than that,” Israni tells me. Agarwal and Israni say they’ve worked this year to move the conference away from just their vision and incorporating their expanded she++ team’s and Stanford CS professors’ visions to make the conference more representative of the Stanford community. They’ve added smaller workshops and more one-on-one networking and mentoring this year in response to feedback. The conference featured a student panel and led by Snapchat co-founder Bobby Murphy and representatives from Box, Square, Microsoft, Udacity, Dropbox, Getco, LinkedIn, and Benesse on everything from “Computer Science in the Finance World” to “Acing the Technical Interview” to “Taking an App from Idea to Implementation.”
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CrunchWeek: Facebook’s Weird Home Commercial; Our Experiences With Google Glass, And Fibermania
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
The weekend is here, and so is another episode of , the TechCrunch TV show where a few of us writers sit down for some real talk about the stories that dominated the tech world over the past seven days. This week, , and I talked about featuring a screaming goat, our (which was released to developers this week) and the expansion of
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Newly Discovered Android Malware Was Downloaded Millions Of Times
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
Security firm has detailed a clever new bit of Android Malware lurking in the Google Play store. The good news: unless you’re downloading questionable Russian clone apps, you’re probably not affected. The bad news: that hasn’t kept it from being downloaded a few million times. The new malware, fittingly dubbed “BadNews”, has been spotted tucked into 32 different apps from 4 separate developer accounts. Since Google Play only gives download numbers as huge ranges, no one can say how many devices this has affected. With the lowball estimates, it’s around two million. On the high end, it’s as many as nine million. In reality, it’s somewhere in between the two. As the BadNews bug appears to have been distributed as an ad framework for developers to use, it’s unclear how many of the infected apps were built primarily for malicious reasons. It’s quite possible that some of the apps were built by well-meaning developers who just made a bad decision on an ad provider. While Google has been making an effort to crackdown on malware with things like (which constantly scans the Play store’s apps for telltale signs of malware), it’s a never-ending (and very much uphill) battle. BadNews snuck into the store by posing as an ad network, only firing off the nasty bits of code by way of remote signal once it had found its way onto a bunch of devices. So, what makes BadNews bad news? It does at least two things you’d probably rather your phone didn’t do: LookOut has the , with over half of them targeted at Russian users. The most popular, by far, is “Savage Knife”, a game meant to simulate — or, as it’s better known, “that dumb game where you try not to cut off your finger”. By the time it was pulled from the store yesterday, it had somewhere between one and five million installs. Following LookOut’s report, Google has pulled all 32 known-infected apps for the store. Malware? On Preposterous. Wait, no.
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CBS Twitter Accounts Hacked, Tweeting Suspicious Links
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
[tweet https://twitter.com/CBSMatt/status/325693879804362754] At least 3 CBS-affiliated , apparently by a rabid conspiracy theorist who wants the world to believe that President Obama is aiding Al-Qaeda. Accounts for , and @ have all been hacked, some tweeting suspicious links (don’t click on them). Screenshots below. CBS is apparently working with Twitter to get the situation under control.
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Watch A Drone Visit College Football To Give Coaches Better Perspective
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
[tweet https://twitter.com/TennesseeBeat/statuses/324905773811519489] University of Tennessee coach Butch Jones wanted to get an eagle-eye view of his players but apparently didn’t have the resources to spend it on the kinds of expensive, cable-suspended Skycam equipment used by broadcasters. Instead, , in what — or one of the first — uses of unmanned aerial vehicles in college football. A Vine (above) showing the coaches warming up the drone for practice immediately started making the rounds on sports blogs. , military drone technology was quickly adopted by the entertainment industry, and is becoming more pervasive for aerial footage. “Even at upwards of $5,000 per day, a drone runs a fraction of the cost of a helicopter rental,” explains Joe Spring. A number of policymakers moratoriums on low-surveillance drones, until privacy laws can catch up to the quickly evolving technology. But flying cameras are completely legit for sports. Interestingly, Coach Jones credits the experiment to a Google-style mass-innovation approach to management: “It’s a number of guys. It’s our support staff, it’s [Sports Technology Coordinator] Joe Harrington. It’s everyone just always trying to make the program better each and every day. That’s the culture that we’re building here. It doesn’t matter if it’s our secretaries, our equipment staff, our training staff, or our cooks. How can we make Tennessee football better each and every day?”
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Gillmor Gang Live 04.20.13
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
– Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor.
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Gillmor Gang: Kaleidoscope Eyes
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — picture themselves in a boat on a river, as the first wave of Google Glass hits the network, aka Scoble’s forehead. @scobleizer promises to never take off this thing, and even the hyperbole doesn’t refute the central notion. As was evidenced over the last few days in Boston, the whole world is not only watching but feeding the realtime stream. Social meets mainstream. As Google Glass goes into alpha, Apple’s stock collapse seems to indicate a changing of the guard. But our bet (I don’t think I’m alone in this) reflects not only the volatility of who’s on first but the value of a real horse race in floating all boats. More likely we’ll see a back and forth motion as Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook surge ahead and then are overtaken. The winners — that would be us. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Vine, The App That Eats Your Precious Memories
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
No app has ever broken my heart quite like , Twitter’s six-second animation maker. You capture a scene, then pocket your phone while you think of a witty way to describe it. But when you open it a few minutes later or the app randomly crashes, it’s gone. That moment, that memory, deleted. I still love Vine, but I’ll never forgive it for the visions it stole from me. Essentially, if you record a Vine but then close the app and don’t share it right away from the screen where you choose a description plus what social networks to share to, the video deletes itself.
If you’re lucky, when you open Vine to the horror of the homescreen instead of your art in the composer, Vine will have saved your deleted animation as a video clip to your camera roll. But you’re not allowed to import videos; you have to shoot them in the app. That video clip is no Vine, it’s a shadow, one that can’t be easily shared. And often there’s no clip saved. I’d say the app has eaten about half of the Vines I’ve ever shot. This whole situation is just one of Vine’s many flaws. Of course it deserves some slack, as it’s and only on version 1.0.7. Still, Vines frequently fail to upload, randomly refuse to load in the feed, there’s no way to share privately, and it crashes all the time taking your current Vine to hell with it. It’s when Vines disintegrate that I get truly angry, though. It’s blatant violation of the implicit value exchange between a human and an app. Rather than live a moment, I recorded it. When I ended up with nothing to show for it, I feel cheated. It makes me wary to reach for my phone when I see something beautiful. Maybe that’s a good thing. The fact that we have trouble simply experiencing beauty, joy, or spectacle if we don’t make a permanent, dumbed-down copy of it is a bit sad. But if I make the conscious decision to trade now for forever, I damn well better get my forever. And now when I use the app, there’s a deep-seated fear that my creation will vanish, with or without a trace. This isn’t Snapchat. Your content isn’t supposed to disappear. The fact that was the in the App Store two weeks ago despite its shortcomings is a testament to its brilliant concept and responsive design. But listen, ye Vine developers who frequently shun press requests: “Fix this. Save any Vine we’ve finished shooting as a draft. Earn our trust. Because apps aren’t supposed to make you feel such a profound sense of loss. There’s plenty of that in real life.”
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OK Glass, RIP Privacy: The Democratization Of Surveillance
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 4 | 20 |
How’s this for synchronicity: Google Glass on the same week that , 3DRobotics unveiled their , and and pored over surveillance photos trying to crowdsource the identity of the Boston bombers. Cameras on phones. Cameras on drones. Cameras on glasses. Cameras atop , in ATMs, on the , on , up . Modern cars log their manufacturers can access if they so desire. Oh, and “ .” In 1999, Sun CEO Scott McNealy : “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Sadly, that sounds more every week. I’ve been that “Soon enough, pseudonymity and anonymity will only exist online; in the real world…they’ll be more or less extinct.” The hunt for the Boston bombers is to the coming world of surveillance as a 1980s PC is to a modern server farm. recognition, recognition, the size of dragonflies — all here already. Just imagine twenty years from now. Every step you take outside will automatically be tracked, indexed, and correlated to all of your previous activity ever. One can reasonably dispute whether the crowdsourced 4chan/Reddit attempt to identify the Boston bomber was a good thing or not, and are in of that — Wild how Reddit users crowdsource photo of Boston suspect, zoom, enhance. Source: — Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/324561481104506882 If you/someone you know is circulating CCTV pix of random people from Boston Marathon circled b/c they have a backpack, STOP. THAT IS DUMB. — Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) Seriously: circulating photos you and yer Scooby Doo crimefighter pals have determined to be of the Boston Bomber is criminally stupid — Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) — but to me, the important thing is the precedent it sets. As never before in history, as proved in Boston, the observed world is becoming the recorded world. — Gus Silber (@gussilber) A lot of people (just read the comments on ) are seriously squicked by the possibility of video surveillance, but are essentially OK with being watched by governments or corporations. I think that is an extremely wrong and dangerous attitude, because I believe one-way transparency will inevitably breed corruption and abuse. I am not in favor of the death of personal privacy in public spaces. I just think it’s inevitable. Soon enough cameras and surveillance software will be ubiquitous. There are already terrified voices, eg , crying for “installing surveillance cameras everywhere” on the eyebrow-raising grounds that “we’re already being watched—just not systematically”. And that’s why–despite its potentially undesirable social side effects–I’m a for Google Glass and its ilk. If transparency will be forced on us, then it needs to be two-way transparency. It’s a given that the strong and rich will be able to watch the weak and poor; we need to ensure that the converse is possible as well. We need to democratize surveillance, and Google Glass is the first of a new kind of tool which can help us do just that. As the book "Cypherpunks" by my friend et al says what we need is to democratize massive crypto tools — Renata Avila (@avilarenata) For instance, I’d like law enforcement, border patrol, the TSA, and other authorities to wear Glass-like cameras at all time, and for that video to be accessible by the public when the abuse of authority is alleged. Interestingly, there’s now some supporting that stance: “Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers.” In the of the ACLU: We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the government should be watching over the population en masse. [but] When it comes to the citizenry watching the government, we like that. Giving the public some access to police footage isn’t enough, though. We need the people to be able to watch and record their government, just as their government keeps them under constant surveillance. Unfortunately, that inevitably also means that individuals can and will frequently surveil and record each other. Which means bullying, stalking, trolling, and on, well, almost a scale: Becoming hard to tell difference between credible news organizations like 4chan and troll sites like New York Post. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) I’m not happy about any of this. But drastically increased surveillance in public places is inevitable. Sorry. It’s just going to be too cheap, too easy, too convenient, and too reassuring to too many. transparency, however, will be a huge battle. The powers that be have every incentive to foster a about the stalker evils of personal cameras like Google Glass, and crowdsourced surveillance like that of 4chan and Reddit. Again, I don’t actually think either is necessarily desirable in and of themselves. But I fear that they’re the price we’ll have to pay to have a society relatively free of systematic hierarchical abuse of authority and power — because, more and more, we live in a world where privacy is power. Lingeswaran Marimuthukumar, .
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Concert Window, The Netflix For Live Concerts, Gives Fans A New, Mobile-Friendly Venue On The Web
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Back in February, , a new startup backed by Silicon Valley veterans that’s on a mission to create a scalable platform for broadcasting live concerts, from arenas to small clubs, backed by a library of recorded shows, profiles and music info. Of course, a platform for live concerts isn’t exactly a new idea. In fact, it’s been floating around for years, but those entering the space have been hamstrung to an over-abundance of friction stemming from royalty and licensing issues and having to convince venues to install the technology and hardware — among other things. As a result, live online music has been slow to take off. But the EvntLive founders see a new music industry beginning to emerge, in which the new scale of online consumption and distribution channels now allow artists to tap into much larger audiences. In turn, with digital music moving towards free, artists now make most of their money from touring, but because they can only tour so much and play so many venues, the access to new audiences and ticket sales afforded by a live, online platform is becoming more appealing. EvntLive isn’t the only startup looking to capitalize on this shift. While it remains in private beta, services like , and are live and finding traction. Concert Window co-founder Dan Gurney tells us that the startup is beginning to hit its stride, having quadrupled revenue over the last five months, added a handful of employees and is now broadcasting over 100 live shows each month. The startup has been able to do so by broadcasting live concerts over the Web, allowing you to listen and watch as the concert happens from the comfort of your couch. To address the friction for venues mentioned above, Concert Window attempts to take the work out of the hands of venue managers — all the venue needs is an Internet connection. The startup provides the equipment, camera and cables, and its system controls the broadcast remotely, so, after the initial setup, venues can just kick back and stream whenever they please. No production team required. On the user experience end, Concert Window has done its best to keep online ticket prices low (under $10, depending on the concert), and distributes two-thirds of ticket sales to the venue and artist, making it a comparable revenue split to iTunes and app stores. Both the video and audio quality are high, which is a must for online concert services, and if you have a good sound system and are lazy like I am, it almost beats being there in person. By addressing these barriers, Concert Window has been able to stream 2,000 concerts with 1,500+ artists at 15 partner venues to date. To really make a dent, it will be key to offer more selection, but it’s a pretty good start. From the beginning, Concert Window has dealt with licensing and rights hurdles by focusing exclusively on livestreaming, rather than offering both streaming and archiving. This leaves a gap in the experience, and down the road, the startup that takes the cake in this space is going to do both (and do both on mobile), but it will be a long, uphill battle to work out all the minutia with rights holders. Since launching last fall, Concert Window has been focused on building relationships with venues and artists, meaning that design and its UI have taken a backseat. But, today, the startup officially launched a platform-wide redesign and new branding. The startup now offers an HTML5-compatible site, allowing viewers to tap into what it claims is the largest concert volume of any live music platform from their computer, smartphone or tablet. By offering a mobile experience, a relatively steady stream of concerts and allowing fans to chat with each other and leave feedback for artists, Concert Window hopes its v2.0 can give it a leg up on the competition. Find Concert Window
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Blackstone Reportedly Withdraws Bid For Dell, Citing “Deteriorating” Business
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 18 |
Blackstone has reportedly withdrawn its bid for Dell, leaving the way open for founder Michael Dell and Silver Lake to buy out the company, . Blackstone and activist investor Carl Icahn for Dell on March 22, the last day of the “go-shop” period to solicit competing offers for Dell after Michael Dell and Silver Lake made a $24.4 billion buyout offer for the PC maker that some investors complained undervalued the company. The Reuters report said it’s still unclear why Blackstone decided to drop its offer, though sources said Blackstone decided to walk away from the deal after “discovering that Dell’s business was deteriorating faster than previously understood.” Dell’s shrank to 4.88 percent from 5.81 percent a year earlier, while its cash flow from operations was reduced to $1.44 billion from $1.84 billion. Sales fell 11 percent to $14.3 billion. The company has been hurt as demand for PCs waver due to competition from mobile devices. According to IDC, global PC sales fell 14 percent in the first quarter. Icahn and Blackstone initially discussed working together on a rival bid. Blackstone offered to pay more than $14.25 per share for Dell. Icahn, who is being advised by investment bank Jefferies Group, offered $15 per share for 58 percent of Dell’s stock, and has yet to drop the proposal, which means there may still be a bidding war for the PC maker. Michael Dell and Silver Lake’s offer was to take Dell private for $13.65 per share, with Silver Lake putting up $1.4 billion. That deal would allow Michael Dell to remain CEO of the company, and he’d also contribute his 16 percent stake in Dell’s equity to the deal along with cash from his investment firm MSD Capital. Michael Dell has stated that he wants to shift Dell’s strategy to focus on tablets, data-center hardware, and software for corporations from manufacturing PCs. He returned as CEO of Dell in 2007 after originally resigning that position in 2004.
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